Owlcat certainly has a hardon for Owlbears. That’s what, 46 STR? Level 9/10 area I think. Also 2d6+33 damage. Yeah this game’s bosses were built for munchkins.
Compared to my already super abusive AC stacking. Mirror Image / Displacement saves lives.
Belt of Physical Perfection +2 / Amulet of Mighty Fists +3 for the stuff it was guarding/killing it
Well “canny defense” seems a lot better than “uncanny defense.” Though I doubt my comment helps much.
@ShivaX read (and this makes sense) that with the really big, dangerous melee threats your high AC might or might not protect against that first attack in a round, but it helps a ton against second, third, etc. attacks (which all lose a stacking -5 off the base attack). So in the above, that Owlbear may only need a 5 to hit you, he needs a 10, then a 15, then if he has a 4th attack, it needs a natural 20 to hit. So you save yourself quite a bit of pain by having as high an AC as possible.
Hot Fix 1.09 just dropped.
I’m in the final Chapter 6 dungeon and I’m getting super frustrated by some of the fights. Partly (mostly) due to not having my normal party of characters I used most of the 70 hours as I lost some to … story events, due not not completing their quests (one of which was totally my fault slash intentional, but the other 3 were due to script errors causing me to not be able to). Of those, one of them is critical to my strategy so that sucked. I’ll keep at it, and hopefully we can still beat the game and such.
Reading the hot fix notes, I see at least one companion quest bug that directly caused me to lose access to Linzi was fixed. Sigh. I should have waited to play this. Ah well, nothing for it now. Scratch that, two of them fixed, and one for the aforementioned critical companion I desperately miss. Crap.
From the notes:
This hotfix happens to be a big one – more like a patch, in fact. A big and important feature comes live in this version: from now on, you can choose between different Kingdom region upgrades - which become available together with the new state of your capital, the city outfit.
Also relevant:
Finally, there is one more thing we at Owlcat wanted to talk to you about.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to the speed with which we solve newly-found issues - to be completely honest, it doesn’t leave us enough time to test all of the game thoroughly after each fix. It takes a whole week at minimum to test every aspect of our complex game, so delivering 2-3 hotfixes each week leaves our team only enough time to check fixes locally. Still, we know this is no excuse for issues that persist in the game, as well as those that are added with some of the fixes. Every bug report we receive literally tears us apart with the feeling of guilt for not finding and solving the issue before the game went live. As such, we want to be open with all you Pathfinders, so that you understand our philosophy and our current pipeline. Right now we feel it is more important to keep fixing critical issues as quickly as possible, rather than to stop releasing hotfixes for about 2 weeks and focus on a big patch.
Once we are sure all major problems have been addressed, we will get back to a more stable, “patch-oriented” development approach.
Thank you for your patience and your support! That is what keeps us alive and kicking.
OK, here’s some more analysis on why Kingdom Building is shit and nonfunctional. For reference I just finished Season of Bloom aka Part 2 or 3 depending on who you’re talking to.
TLDR: Building stuff does fuck all, the only important part is dealing with event cards. All those fancy adjacency bonuses / building bonuses are worthless to think about.
First of all, this is how the economy works
You are able to rank up kingdom stats per 20 stats by spending 14 days of your and an advisor’s time. I am able to level up to Rank 5 for a few of those stats, but haven’t had the time due to murderous beasts running around the kingdom.
Thus we can assign a direct value to each stat increment - 1 stat = 0.05 BP/week.
Now let’s take a look at my capital, which initially had has been just been upgraded to a town (at the cost of 50BP)
Go back up and look at my kingdom stats. If I tally up all my buildings across 5 territories, buildings are contributing 56 stats out of 445. Yeah. Building shit does nothing in comparison to successfully completing/savescumming kingdom card events.
Oh, how about some of the projects? Let’s take this trading project.
And don’t get me started on the timesink of curse research that leaves you unable to respond to events. Though funnily enough, those sometimes have a better BP payoff than spending on buildings since they reward stats. The problem is opportunity cost of not having an advisor available to handle other shit that will pop up in the 60 days it takes. Other times, the stat rewards are worse than the buildings.
I’m fairly convinced that you never make your total BP investment back over the course of the game. Despite having no idea how long the game lasts.
Given this the optimal strategy if you happen to be lawful is to plunk down 9 bulletin boards in every town for +18 to event resolution rolls. Talk about engaging.
@ FinnegansFather discussed this without numbers in Tom’s spin-off thread
Wow. That is depressing. I will be turning this on auto the next time I play. I have been reading the Saxon Tales series and what this kingdom level gameplay needs are armies, garrisons and external threats that 6 dudes can’t handle.
How important is Charisma in this game?
I am torn between my Fey Speaker Druid and my Eldritch Scoundrel.
For your main character? incredibly important. (edit - depending if you want to be good and persuasive, or even intimidating, which also uses CHR - if you don’t care and are just going to kill everything, playing it evil maybe for example, probably not that important).
@fdsaion That’s some good info, but I put this on auto last week and never looked back. It basically plays like Icewind Dale 2 with it off. I like it in theory, but I put over 60 hours into it before turning it off and I’m not missing it.
That sucks. No thief for me then! At least for now.
Also, why do people keep bad mouthing the archeologist? Are they crazy?
I haven’t heard anyone bad mouth the archaeologist, though I’ve never heard anyone say good things. In fact, I’ve heard no one talking about archaeologists until you, and didn’t even know they were in the game! :)
You can still roll a thief, just don’t dump CHR to like a 7 or something, keep it at a 10 maybe, and put a point in persuasion.
Nope, that isn’t how I roll. If I need charisma, then I go full hog into charisma. There are no half measures. Also, no Archeologist, because team good guys will already have a bard.
Maybe they’ll take the NWN 2 route and add extra campaigns to the game.
This is one of the main reasons I like Icewind Dale over Baldur’s Gate.
I might bring in a merc, but I like to play with as many game characters as possible.
I do too, at least for my first and usually second play throughs.
I’m stumped at the end game because I’m kind of angry about how things played out with the quests I was not even able to complete (some of which have since been fixed, but too late for me) and between that, me not having enough supplies in this place (and there is a vendor but she sells 0 supplies, like they have them in her inventory but it’s a 0 quantity for some reason, so I’m sort of screwed). I have two more rests in me, but I feel like a lot of map left to explore and the fights are just incredibly nonesense. I mean, it’s the last level, so I get it, but it’s wearing on my desire to keep pushing forward a little, I have to admit. I’d be fine if I could get more camping supplies, dammit.
I almost had another quest bug out on me but luckily when I reloaded and tried again it worked out. It is a main quest so I’m not sure if I could have continued.
I think my current quest is one of my favorites. I’m in the chapter after Season of Bloom. Something about the environments is just clicking with me. I’m either level 10 or 11 and things are still pretty much melting when my mob attacks them. I pretty much am still just having everyone attack the same enemy, but i will adjust some people if it is pathing them around enemies. I wish I didn’t reach my limit with RTwP. Maybe it would be better with a party of 4 and a difficulty that was tuned better.
For the most part I enjoy the writing and the characters, but I thought Chris Avalone was supposed to be one of the top notch writers. While good enough this doesn’t seem like top tier stuff and the characters lack something that bioware characters have (not the romance).
I wonder how an open world game would work with this system, with a better strategic layer on top of it. A big world to explore with maybe some type of overall story but which could be ignored. Have things happen in the world based on the conditions in the world instead of predefined quests. For example, there could be a kobold lair near a town. If left unchecked it becomes a greater menace and starts killing livestock, and then maybe townsfolk - which hurts the region’s economy, etc… Maybe eventually you can become the leader of a town and can raise a militia to send to the lair. Maybe you can choose to go there with a party yourself. Sort take some of the spirit of what Kingmaker does and expand upon it and make that part more of a proper game. I’m not sure if I’m wording all this clearly.
I think he’s more than a bit overextended at this point. It seems like his name has been attached to almost every RPG I’ve had any interest in lately.
How do you know which parts Chris Avalone wrote? There are 8 narrative staff members (only one of which is Chris)?
Also, while looking up how many different writers worked on the game, I found this!
That’s awesome! Congrats Scott.
I guess I wasn’t thinking that he only wrote a fraction of the game. Maybe he did write the best parts :-)
What you want is Jagged Alliance 2. With swords.
That is exactly what I want.
I played JA2 a long time ago, but I think the strategic layer is lighter than what I was thinking.
Well, the things you mentioned are in it. Instead of a kobold lair, there is a lair of bloodcats that are hunting the local people. You can also raise a town militia if you want. There are also events you can trigger through your actions, such as the Drassen counterattack.
After a certain point it is safe to ignore the story. (Or at least until you run out of money.)
