Tried picking this up again after putting Wrath of the Righteous aside. Went with RT mode as I heard a lot of the stuff with action speed just does not translate into TB mode and the game is just designed around RT, unlike Pathfinder which ported over the tabletop ruleset and works well in a TB format. After seeing how armor works with the heavier stuff reducing your action speed I can see what they’re talking about.
That being said… man, I really hate RTwP. Is it expected that I be pausing every couple seconds (I do have combat slowed down, although not to the slowest)? I really dislike that but it seems like that is what the game is expecting me to do. I’ve really struggled in a lot of encounters as I’m feeling like I have to micro every action of my party to get past one “skull” encounter areas. I just feel like if I’ve gotta pause every second or two to give actions to my party members, why not just make a turn-based system?!
In any case, any tips for combat so I can get over some early difficulty humps? The last 1-skull area I was in contained a 3-skull baddy with a bunch of friends and I just could not get past him. I’m new to the game so that’s not necessarily a problem, but are 3-skull enemies supposed to be doable and I just need to git gud or if I see 3-skull baddies should I be running for the hills? My party composition kind of sucks I think and I don’t really know how to use the Cipher NPC I picked up so there’s a lot of headroom there for me, but any advice general or specific would be welcome. :)
No, I don’t even pause for most fights unless I want to use specific abilities, really - though I tend to set up scripts to auto-use certain abilities. That said, I have found that with more experience with the system and the game the combat feels slower just by virtue of you know what’s going on better. Player experience helps here, in other words. I like the game starts you off small with a low party count and ramps it up, but even so if you are new to the game (and aren’t huge on RTwP in general) it’s just going to feel a little overwhelming.
My advice is lower the difficulty a bit until you feel comfortable with the rules (and/or find yourself stomping the encounters).
“getting good” isn’t a thing here (well, it is in terms of taking advantage of the systems and synergies and min/maxing I suppose) - “leveling up” is the key to taking on encounters with skulls - the number of skulls only indicates how many levels higher than you the enemy is. In this case, he’s 3 levels higher - which is huge when you are level like 3 or whatever.
Great, thank you. I don’t have a lot of context for a lot of this stuff so you helped fill in some of those gaps. I’ll need to look into setting up scripts. Do you just give an order of abilities to execute or can you do things like “If HP hits 50%, use a healing ability”? Maybe having to pause so often is because I’m biting off more than I can chew. I tried to avoid higher level areas but I’ll have to poke around more and see if there’s something my level I can do (I just left Nekarata or whatever the city name is).
Also, is there a way to autoresolve ship-to-ship battles (not talking about boarding)? I don’t find them too interesting and the one I did seemed to take a long time to resolve. Granted, I was outclassed and know now that I should have just run, but in any case something I’d probably want to autoresolve if there’s an option for that.
This is almost certainly true, given your description of tackling areas with skulls. I can’t remember the best early-game order to do stuff, but I recommend a walkthrough to help you go to where you want to be going, and make sure you did all the side quests in that early island, if you haven’t.
As for scripts, I did a video on them if that’s helpful, but I’m sure there are better/more updated videos by now.
Yeah, you can “auto-board” the ship and fight a regular combat - be wary of crews higher level and more powerful than your party though - keep a quick save handy, though the part of the map you are on shouldn’t have anything you can’t handle, just be careful venturing to far from the starting location.
The scripting videos are hugely helpful, though the interface is pretty intuitive. And the best thing about it is how it removes all prep for each fight, you can set abilities and skills to automatically initiate upon start of combat so you don’t have to manually do it. It’s helpful because there’s quite a bit of combat encounters in the game.
I have a contrary view on RTwP: I like the game auto-pausing for me often during combat so I set up a number of them from the get-go. I also manually pause to catch the action and give commands as I find the battles too chaotic to manage and enjoy otherwise. If this was a single-character game, I wouldn’t pause so much, but managing a party scattered around the screen in real time isn’t my thing. It’s probably why I also dropped RTS games. I don’t find pausing interferes with the game, but that’s because it’s the way I’ve been playing this style of game going back to the first time I encountered it (would that be the 90’s?). I think @Scotch_Lufkin’s point, though, about lowering the difficulty and getting comfortable with the style, when you may want to pause combat, and just taking your time with it, is a good strategy. There’s a balance that can be different for everyone and finding it for you can take a bit.
I only played it in RTwP mode and didn’t consider TB for it simply because I knew how much extra time TB would add to the overall gameplay (probably 2.5x longer). It was already a huge game.
Getting ganked by high level ships really killed my enjoyment of the game. I still haven’t finished the game despite loving the first and backing the kickstarter for both.
I alway hate crap like that. I dropped Xenoblade 2 for the same reason. I’m just out here trying to finish a fetch quest and some level 200 Condor swoops down and mercs me with no chance to escape.
I found speed to be the most important aspect of ship combat. Get in close, board, and finish them off in close combat rather than ship-to-ship battles. It was more enjoyable that way anyway.
I really love some CRPG adaptations to D20 systems as well. Spells per encounter is so much better than spells per day in combat-heavy CRPGs. I’ve always found it to be such an awkward fit in the Pathfinder games and between that and the buffing chores… ugh, those are things that could really be streamlined. And sounds like Obsidian thought as much for PoE2, lucky me.
Odd. I found the game to be too easy. Especially compared to Pillars 1. Maybe you are still early game and went to a tougher area too soon?
After going to the big capital city and questing there like it’s BG2 I came out pretty strong and none of the content really challenged me unless I upped the difficulty after that.
Think difficulty changed over patching process as well. I remember Path of the Damned on launch was pretty straightforward when I completed it and I think they changed the balance around that at least?
I had to play Pathfinder games (and replay BG/PST) to really appreciate what Pillars of Eternity did. It’s genius. It still has most of what makes d20 what it is, but it removes all the bullshit. Prebuffing. Constant misses making you feel like it all depends on RNG. Boring character progression with a variety of noob traps. Boring itemization cause it doesn’t matter how many interesting weapons I find, I specialize in scythes and few of those games will ever give me a good choice in that regard.
As for your questions sadly RT is much better than TB in that game. They did a lot of work adapting the rules but TB is still off. It also suffers from fights often dragging after they’re decided. Even in RT I often sped up the action looking at my dudes surrounding the last tanky enemy and beating him, in TB it’s exhausting. You should also don’t tackly skull’d enemies till you realy know what you’re doing. Early at the ruins you might find a big pack of enemies in the middle, this is a game’s way to tell you that you don’t have to fight everyone, those enemies don’t actually prevent you from going where you want to. For a lot of time I’ve played without scripting but you should do at least a little of those scripts enabled. Like others have said - let Barbarians enter rage at the start, tell everyone to use Second Wind if they’re dying, that kind of thing.
If you played it on release it was too easy. They’ve tinkered with the difficulty in the patches. And then they’ve added Megabosses and SSS expansion that has a lot of challenges.
Ah! That message wasn’t received by me, although I did kill them after a reload.
Definitely sounds like I’ve wandered off into areas I shouldn’t and I think I know where that happened. I’m going to head back to the big city and explore around, look for side quests.
I’m glad to hear I’m not expected to pause every second or two and that I shouldn’t be fighting 3-skull enemies, particularly this early. Early on it’s just hard to know if its me as a player needing to be better at the game or if I’ve missed lower level areas or what, so thanks for all the feedback in this thread.
Now that I think about it, that pack in the ruins is mostly that hard in the max difficulty mode. This mode changes some of the encounters to be harder. I’ve completed the game on max difficulty more than once but I don’t think I have ever beaten those guys.
Skulls are relative level. You can comfortably complete the game and most of the side activities without ever fighting anyone with a skull.
