I decided to jump back into Pathfinder to give it another try after my first attempt fizzled out. This time, I’m going turn-based even though I prefer the rtwp system. This game seems to be designed around a more tactical approach to combat situations than the faster system allows. I’m hoping switching up the style will give me the interest in keeping it going beyond the 9 hours or so I put in originally.
It really is.
I’m in a broadly similar boat to you, and finding the game much stickier with turn-based combat.
Kingmaker’s slavish devotion to tabletop d20 in all its glory means that all the distinctions between move/standard/full-round actions really matter – and that stuff is almost totally elided in the RTwP engine.
All the interactions between feats and combat maneuvers and attacks of opportunity and movement really come out in the turn-based setting they were designed for, whereas it all just kinda mushes together in RTwP and ends up feeling like a low-rent Baldur’s Gate.
BG2 and the IWD games were adapted very intentionally from AD&D to fit the Infinity Engine and be fun, and sanding away some of the nuance of the tabletop system was no doubt very much intentional. P:K adheres to tabletop d20 to a fault, which makes it a vastly better turn-based game than RTwP.
And I’m very much a RTwP guy. BG2 is my favorite RPG of all time, and the IWD games are in the pantheon. But turn-based is just a vastly better experience here.
Started with Paladin Hospitalier.
Act 1 is more freeform than I thought. Like I didn’t know you can actually follow your so-called nemesis immideately after first encounter with him. I think it puts you in a relatively dangerous area though. Turn-based combat feels right, like the game was meant to have it. I’m not even sure now which rules apply to real-time combat. Like does it have step? Does it allow you to act if you didn’t run for too long?.. Also needless to say the balance is completely different. Like that standard bull rush attack is useless in real-time cause it makes your warriors stand there waiting for the opportunity to use it which might take more time than just running to the enemy and attacking them, not to mention that the enemy might be out of range by the time it charges.
So far I’ve encountered only 3 bugs but 2 of them are connected to new functionality. One of them prevents me from playing with gamepad (some buttons do not register) but I probably wouldn’t play it that way anyway. Another one just killed my character in an area with no enemies and was just fixed with reload. Third one was just a UI quirk, the UI is still programmed horribly (hint: when you see a confirmation popup hotkeys might still work and confirming the popup may have unexpected results). Hope I’ll be able to finish this run.
I really couldn’t agree with you more. 100% prefer RTWP, but the d20 system doesn’t really work with it. Animation times particularly on all ranged attacks and spells have an actual impact on the gameplay in RTWP. If your ranger pops off 5 shots in a round and the 5th is fatal, the enemy still has a reasonable chance of acting between his various attack animations. Whereas under the tabletop rules that they otherwise adhere to so slavishly, that same enemy would simply die during the rangers turn and not get some stray action off. Likewise your mages can completely just whiff their spells if animation timers get their target killed before the spell animation completes, which is something that is not actually possible in tabletop.
I’m actually looking forward to going through this again with turn based mode when I get some free time.
Her starter weapon is over sized and comes with a penalty to hit. Give her a regular (Masterwork, if possible, magical of course would be better) Bastard Sword and make sure to give her Weapon Focus in whatever weapon you do give her, that’s another +1 to hit. Also, it’s good to have a Cleric cast Bless in combat, +1 to attack rolls is huge, more so than you’d think, and it all adds up. Give her bonus STR whenever possible, she uses STR to determine attack roll bonuses. Yeah, hitting things is more important than occasionally hitting hard, especially when you are talking about a Barbarian.
Plus, if you like the size bonus of that weapon, giving her a traditional weapon she can actually handle and then casting Enlarge Person on her will give you very desirable results. :)
I really like This Amri build.
She can cast her own bless, and her animal companion becomes a real monster. Teamwork feats help a lot with her base attack bonus.
What a cool idea. I think for sure my next play through I want to either roll up my own characters or use guides just like this to get some mileage out of these characters I just don’t have time/imagination to come up with myself.
I switched her over to 2H fighter, as Barbarian is pretty underwhelming IMO.
Power Attack + Cleave + Cleaving Finish is l e g i t.
Anyone playing this on a PC with an Xbox controller with the new turnbased mode?
I’ve tried Steam Controller, but pad press didn’t work for me so I didn’t get far. Looks like an impressive rework though.
This is the way.
Turn-based mode really turned this game around for me. I was always fine with the Pillar of Eternity games’ RTwP, but Kingmaker was overwhelming to me. I remember a good friend who knows DnD like the back of his hand saying the same thing about the BG games, just too much going on all at once for him to enjoy and I felt the same way with this game until this patch.
Amiri is very poorly stated out imo.
Also vanilla Barbs are just flatout weaker than any Barb variant in this game iirc.
Two Handed Fighter is insanely good and where most people go with her if they don’t respec her via mod.
Otherwise it’s about forgetting she has that silly sword that makes her miss all the time. Just toss her a Greatsword/Greataxe and let her do her thing, pump her strength when you can and give her to hit buffs wherever possible. Barbs have a rage stance thing that stacks with everything, so most people say to get that option instead of the other ones. Of course even once she can finally hit things, she still drops like a fly most of the time if focused.
Speccing her out for bastard sword is useful because of quest weapons you get later in the game. The build I linked above does change her to two-handed fighter after pimping out her animal companion.
At the risk of sounding like a big dummy how do you respec your companions? I haven’t played the game in a while so if it’s part of the normal process I have forgotten about it.
Wow.
Turn-based mode is completely revolutionary. It’s like a whole new game. I’m blown away.
Classes that require lots of micromanagement, like Inquisitors and Magus, are suddenly infinitely more viable. Because no one has the patience to deal with that crap with RTwP. But with turn-based, of course you’re going to click those buttons.
Secondary and tertiary abilities that you never use in RTwP suddenly have a place. It’s now possible to use Burning Hands and dozens of other spells effectively. This makes spells that were mostly useless before suddenly very useful.
The downside is that turn-based is going to turn a 150+ hour game into a 200+ hour game.
I find that turn-based doesn’t really actually make it take that much longer. You’ll be so much more effective in battles you’ll spend less time healing up and buffing etc.
You can also turn it off temporarily for trivial fights.
It’s still easy to breethe through trash fights with RTwP. Of course this only highlights how many unnecessary fights are there.
It’s much better than Pillars of Eternity 2 approach. I consider PoE2 to be a much, much better game and I enjoy its gameplay much more. It has very few trash fights. But TB mode is a slog there cause you can never switch to RTwP. And so you spend 5 minutes on a trivial fight. Or fight a huge fight against a lot of enemies for 10 minutes, and then you spend 5 minutes more just chipping away health of the remaining enemy tank. PFKM allows speeding up the combat 10 times, or you can go with standard speed but speed up everything with space.
Also I don’t understand why did they ever bother implementing running attack for all melee characters as well as many other abilities before TB.
I will always choose TB mode over RTwP in any game like this.
Glad to hear several people mention turn-based mode being a big improvement. I fired this game up for the first time when the big enhanced edition update came out and was finding the RTwP system to be holding me back. I don’t necessarily dislike the idea of RTwP, but I don’t like when the implemented expects you to pause all the time. If I’m expected to pause very frequently, I think the game would be better off as a turn-based game. Just my own personal taste/preference.
Anyway, my last impression before shutting the game down was that I didn’t care much for the RTwP system, although other stuff in the game looked pretty promising. Next time I fire it up I’ll give turn-based a shot. Not knowing much about the game, I was worried it was “hacked in” and a suboptimal way to experience the game.