That’s good news!
Yeah my rep helping me may or may not have threatened to hunt down a programmer if he doesn’t get to fixing my account like pronto. I think they may have given me a few chests as extras since I told them I haven’t played since the bug happened out of fear I would make any recovery effort… more difficult.
Aw, man, I thought Obsidian was so helpful to me because I’m a pretty big deal. But it turns out that’s just the way they are?
-Tom, deflated
Seems like it. I got my issue handled reasonably quickly and directly considering I hit it on a weekend and they’ve got to be getting a lot of support requests at the moment.
Been playing around with this the past couple days, and I am getting to the point where I feel like I almost understand the immediate workings of the game. So now I am looking at strategy:
Is there a manual or wiki any place?
Is there ever any choice to change characters’ classes to elite classes, or any similar thing to be planning for?
Is there any advice anywhere as to what is important over the long run? I mean, choosing classes and choosing skill upgrades, I feel I am flying totally blind. I don’t mean any offense to the game, but so far I have no sense that it’s like a regular RPG where you can choose the type of game to play – always fight or depend on stealth or look for diplomatic options. It feels very much on rails, so that if the game makes a lot of scenarios depend on a particular skill, then that’s what you better have.
Rulebook for the physical game will get the job done, I think.
http://paizo.com/download/pathfinder/PZO6000-Rulebook.zip
There is an “advanced” class you pick after chapter 3. Two options for each class (such as Weapon Master for Fighter or Assassin for Rogue).
Most of the things you pick will either be a skill feat (improving a skill or adding a new one, such as the Fighter’s Teamwork skill that adds 1d4 to a combat someone else is having at his location, or the Cleric’s ability to discard a Divine trait card to restore 1d4 cards from the discard pile to someone at her location) or a card feat, which is literally adding more of a type of card (like Weapons, Blessings, Allies) to the deck. My advice for this is to pick the type of card that you like best mostly. Though if you are never not sure, try to add more blessings and allies to decks as they tend to be card you can ditch to explore again, which is really critical if you find yourself running out of time while doing a scenario.
Well I guess they figured out what I did to make my game go bananas:
With your help we figured out why your cards seemed to have disappeared.
Basically, our deck management screen had a fault in it where a player would be able to drag cards from their collection into a deck and while adjusting the deck and dragging cards back INTO collection (which it shouldn’t be allowed to do) it went into a limbo state and “disappeared”.
This would only ever happen is the user was adjusting their decks prior to running their first scenario because after that there is no collection tab in the deck management screen.
I don’t really remember doing this, but it sounds like something I might do. I loaded up my game, added a fighter and spent twenty minutes messing around with everyone deck before starting everything like a good little RPG player. Then I tried to exit deck manager and everything… well died.
Just now getting around to the PC game. So good. Don’t understand half of what just happened (all 5 tutorials done). But so good.
If I have one complaint is that I wish there was a bit more info to plan for a scenario. Is the only way to really plan for what might come up is if you lose the scenario first and keep track of what you encounter?
Not being able to plan means I just try and put together a general party that can handle what may come up. Putting together a party based on more info would be fun.
Still, I really enjoy playing through the scenarios. I’m on campaign 3, The Hook Mountain Massacre.
I guess I thought of a second complaint. The difficulty of finishing on time is greatly affected by the random card shuffle. I’ve run out of time twice so far, and when I replayed it won each one easily. This wasn’t because I changed my tactics, the henchmen were just earlier in the decks.
These are not major complaints though, but addressing them I think would make the game even better.
I know i made fun of Tom earlier for talking about closing the locations as soon as possible, but are you discarding, using your items, blessings and allies, to pull several cards in one turn?
There are times when I do so. I use allies a bunch to get extra exploration. I tend to wait a little bit before I start doing so to see how things are playing out. Maybe I’m not aggressive enough doing that.
I come close often, but I found since I added my fighter (I use 3 characters), I’ve been able to get lucky on early locations. My Rogue, Cleric and Fighter mix is probably pretty boring though.
I just played the first scenario I actively dislike - Here Comes the Flood. I’ve tried doing things to get extra exploration, but that creature just hoovers up cards too quickly. I’ve failed this one three times, and not in a way I thought, boy the challenge in this one is fun. The other scenarios I failed in I still had fun, this one sucks.
I’ve got a Rogue, Fighter, Wizard (I think that is the class name). The wizard has 2 cards I like to use to get extra exploration. One is where you pick a card type and if one of the first three cards in of that type you can encounter it. The other is detect magic, which lets you encounter the top card immediately if it has the magic tag. The wizard also has an ability that lets me explore again if he acquires a spell boon.
That won’t work, because there’s no fixed set of cards for each scenario. Scenarios are just built from the library of cards that you’ve unlocked so far (although I seem to recall lower level cards are culled as you go).
Your best bet is to probably read the physical rules, where they talk you through building the location decks yourself. Once you know how the decks are built, looking through your collection will let you know what you might encounter.
But I absolutely agree that the scenario building should be more above-board. Part of the joy of the physical Pathfinder game is considering your overall library, and from that inferring what monsters you might encounter and what loot you might find!
Those people have names, you know! :)
-Tom
Is it the one linked to on the Steam store page?
I can’t remember those! That’s why I always named my characters the same thing in DnD. Fighters were Flog Fierceful, Rogues were Jake the Snake, and Wizards were Merlin. When I stooped to having a cleric they were named Lovely Les. I did have the decency to put a number suffix on the end to distinguish them from their predecessors :-)
You can name your characters in Pathfinder then you don’t have to remember anymore!
After having played the iOS version with a two-member party (Base Sorcerer and Base Wizard) into AD1, I decided to delete them and start fresh with the PC version. And since the game doesn’t have a random party option, I used random.org to generate a random sequence of numbers from 1-22 (22 because of the alts) and used the first four numbers generated giving me:
- Base Rogue
- Formal Paladin
- Armored Fighter
- Base Ranger
So Intelligence and Wisdom checks are a bitch! And I can forget about recharging Spells that have an Arcane check, or a Divine 9 or higher check. When I encounter Spells, I typically won’t burn cards for extra dice.
Having played the game since Day 1 on iOS, I can say it truly has come a long way. It now plays much more smoothly due to the improved feedback and UI additions. And the displayed success percentage is a godsend I’ve been wanting since Day 1! Sure, I’ve noticed some bugs, but that’s to be expected with so many possible card interactions.
Yeah, when you hit certain adventures Basic keyword cards go out of the game when you encounter them. A bit later, Elite cards. I don’t think it ever goes any further than that but I don’t remember for sure.
Been playing this the last few days, and I am developing a bit of a love-hate relationship with it.
It’s definitely mind engaging and different from what I usually play. I’d say more card game than RPG. And sometimes I end up muttering that this game was made for would-be lawyers: Better read the small print, because the tiniest detail will throw off the proper use of the card. On the other hand, when you get too focused on the details, you find some that do not mean what they say. (Ancient Skeletons say defeating them allows you to immediately attempt to close the location… but at least in Black Fang above normal difficulty, that is not literally true.) That’s the kind of thing that drives me crazy about law, and at moments this game – the tiniest detail can get you, but don’t bet the bank on using the tiniest detail to your benefit.
And this:
Yeah, no doubt this makes an enormous difference. The depth to which the henchmen and villain are buried seems to me a bigger deal than the dice rolls. You can recover from a couple encounters lost where you thought your odds were better than 90%, but not the target cards all being near the bottom. There’s a limit to what you can do with blessings and allies to alleviate this.
One other minor negative for me. I find I really need to play a scenario all at once to have a decent chance, and that takes a while. Definitely prefer to be able to stop and come back after small chunks. But that is probably age more than the game.
:) Hey, I thought I was the only one. I flat out cannot wrap my mind around these names, always call them by their class.