|
Yeah the early game is rough and not forgiving. I don't really know what to make of the game; it's missing something. Right now it's just kind of repetitive since the AI is pretty dim but gets HP bonuses that means taking advantage of it's stupidity is the only way to win since you'll just get torn up in a fair fight. General tips: Skaven get a special ability, Swarm, that boosts to-hit by 10% and crit chance by 5%, if an ally is also fighting the same foe. It's a must have, since you'll want to gang up on enemies as a rule. Maximize OP effectiveness. Use dual wielding when at 3 or 5, one handed at 4 or 6. Getting a skill at higher OP that uses OP is advised. Ranged is generally inferior to melee, imo. They get some cute skills but people move too far in a turn and they get a big aim debuff when the foe is in combat. Having less people to abuse All Alone checks with also kind of sucks. Stunning occurs when you crit a foe. They lose OP/SP, and eat a debuff. Disengage against a stunned foe is free. All attacks against a stunned foe will hit. Abuse this to charge them repeatedly and cycle in new dudes. Beat the everliving poo poo out of them, if you can. Avoid missions where your group is spilt and the foe is not, since you'll just get a group rushed by their whole mob and and killed while your other groups get held up in some doorway. You also can't assign groups so any synergy you tried to make between your dudes is out the window; have fun when your two archers and mage get bumrushed by angry nuns. Rushing forward, like in X Com, is a bad idea. It's not really a big advantage to be the first to charge in, especially if your dudes turns are spaced out enough so your vanguard gets surrounded and killed while isolated. Running forward and mashing Ambush stance is what the AI loves to do and it's really easy to exploit. Once you outnumber the foe, you can keep them pretty neutered by abusing All Alone checks, so you can do optional objectives. They're worth doing. Looting is also worth doing, especially when looting same faction opponents. Stats: Agility can get your dodge levels to crazy levels and makes you harder to hit in melee, and makes moving around easier. Strength is good for henchmen since you just want them to hit hard and not care if they eat poo poo as much. Toughness is a wash: taking hits means you might be crit, and that is bad, and it's skills suck, imo. Leadership is situational. You want to avoid taking All Alone checks if you can help it since if you're taking them at all then things are potentially going bad anyways. Intelligence gives stun resistance which is loving the best thing, and it has nice skills too. Alertness is loving worthless, never level it. Accuracy doesn't improve aim, just crit chances. Weapon/Ballistic skills raise chance to hit. I've tried crit focused builds and they suffer a lot since the chance of critting what you don't hit is generally 0%, but then again you'll always hit a stunned person so... it's a balancing act. For skaven, I get 6 weapon for Swarm and then dump the rest into crit. You can also do cute poo poo where a dude with a melee resistance draining ability like kidney blow softens up the foe for the crit boosting dudes to follow up on, but tbh the initiative system combined with scattered, random deployment zones makes that kind of specialization kind of a pain to pull of. The best skills I can recall: the two active skills that let you dodge/parry twice, anything that drains foes OP, the leadership passive that adds 20% stun resist, vital strike/shot (one extra OP used for more crit chance), kidney blow, mighty charge. Skill Mastery is generally not worth it. You can specialize heroes in fun ways, but henchmen get so few points your just generally give them one active to abuse and two passives that help them not die. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Oct 3, 2015 |
#
¿
Oct 3, 2015 08:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
yeah the whole experience is kind of bland imo. unlike in xcom where skills add new abilities that allow different playstyles, the skills in this game just add damage or % based stuff. The weapon choices are similar; seeing foes armed with spears basically has no impact on my playstyle compared to if they had swords. It doesn't help how the interface doesn't provide any information on your enemies that let's you really gauge how much you need to give a poo poo about a 15% parry reduction or whatever. I was honestly considering making a feedback video where I just play it a bit and complain about stuff as I come across it. This game annoys me; it's not bad but their design decisions are pretty uninspired.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2015 06:21
|
|
|
yeah, any mission that results in your team spread out, and the enemy team stuck together, is going to result in you eating poo poo regardless of whatever narrative theyre pushing
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2015 21:00
|
|
|
Do tell. For me they tend to wind up with at least one of my guys out of action before they can move, and having to fight the whole enemy squad while missing three dudes who have to waddle from the rear end end of nowhere. One mission in particular saw my leader stuck with two henchmen at the end of a dead end street as an angry nun mosh pit descended on his position. Then he got stunned and that was pretty much the end of that. Meanwhile, having your own forces concentrated is pure easy street. There's really no tactical advantage to be gained from splitting up.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2015 23:28
|
|
|
when i played this with early access i thought "well gee its pretty shallow and clunky but they'll tune that up a bit" they never tuned it up. its a bad mix of obtuse and shallow. its not worth half an xcom. the 1994 xcom.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2015 04:48
|
|
|
Comparing it to blood bowl is kind of inaccurate. That game is a lot more swingy with it's random stuff, instead of the mostly granular-yet-irritating dice stuff Mordheim has. You generally play risk management with that game, with opportunity for real hail mary bullshit, and you can avoid having your guys die outside of real bad luck (or clawpomb teams) due to rerolls and positioning. Furthermore, winning a game of blood bowl is tangentially related to the stuff that gets dudes killed. You can play around a disadvantage, and can even win with a devil may care attitude and some good fortune. It's actually similar to X Com, in that sense, and in the risk management and positioning sense. The fact that a better player can still die randomly or otherwise be neutralized is a nice way to ensure a means of equalizing things. Mordheim, meanwhile, really forces you to play into getting your poo poo wrecked. The HP system, the OP/SP system, and the dependence on granular increments and skills that, behind the fluff, just really add dps or other direct numbers benefits for min maxing, means that a high level player is going to make a lower level one eat poo poo. There's no real strategy involved beyond how you skill your dudes and following the brain dead pattern of "surround and kill"; it's just a numbers game. The game can still be swingy due to stunning, but it's not really something the player has any control of, like a blood bowl coach deciding to do some dodging with a 1agl dude and having it work; that feels cool. Winning because a dude got stunned isn't, since it's not like I did poo poo for that to happen, aside from maybe stacking up %stun chances. The objectives to win require playing into your teams, disadvantages, as well, and the disadvantage grows larger inexorably as the weaker side loses soldiers, and the loser winds up being much worse off than a loser of a blood bowl game, as they're much more likely to find themselves in a death spiral. While I'm ranting, I feel the devs got real spooked about making skills too good or something, or... poo poo I don't know. The whole thing is just % for OP style weaksauce, and the stuff that really does something is usually rather minor. Blood Bowl skills can really alter the way a character plays: even most skill ups let's you do new things and change your plays, rather than just "hit a guy slightly better" (tho those exist). Xcom skills are big gamechangers that make a character more powerful by adding new options that enable decisive, singular events, granting a player a sense of real agency to what goes on. Even just deciding weapon loadout affects the manner the player interacts with the tactical game. Mordheim doesn't give stuff that opens up new avenues for player agency. The weapons just change numbers, that all can be just broken down into "does this improve my average damage". Even the stuff meant to counter stances are just really loving pathetic; just x% less chance for stances to work. It's utterly passive. No sense of impact; you can't even tell when it would have mattered. There's no interacting systems, no tactical forethought, just the numbers game, and hoping the enemy HP fall faster than yours. It's such a slow loving game, not just due to long animations and silly controls, but because most of the time, you have nothing to think or plan over, or anything to react to. I've had a single moment in this game that made me sit up and go "whoa poo poo" like Blood Bowl or X Com did; my mage rolled a misfire, which caused everyone around him in the melee he was in to get stunned. It was neat, made me react, and gently caress, if skills could do things like that instead of just faffling with the damage% game, it'd be a game that actually rewards planning or positioning and give me something that makes me feel like I'm actually involved with this poo poo show. ok those are my words Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Nov 28, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2015 10:11
|
|
|
on the rats i just loaded then all with that Swarm ability and whatever passives increased hit% and dodge% and had them rank up agility/weapon skill and whatever, and i didn't really have any problems with the AI. I gave a few rats some attack that increases the chance to hit a dude for others as well, and one guy with the poison that took away OP, so its pretty much all based on just ganging up on people and hitting them until they die and then just snowballing. for the leader i gave him the one skill that lets him do extra parries, which meant the AI never bothered trying to hit him despite him being a glass cannon who just spammed precise strike a bunch or whatever i gave him. mages are better used to debuff than to try to do damage, I found. i never used ambush stances or tried to do charge builds since those never seemed to work that great compared to just going for boring consistency, and ambushes were a great way to have a guy run out and eat a lot of poo poo in exchange for uhhhh doing extra damage maybe, in exchange for the opportunity costs of taking away the skills that let them hit okay, all the time, and not die, so yeah. im not really an expert at the game but it worked out against AI with no big issues, even when they had the big health bonus. still, if the ai actually bothered focusing down the rats that actually could hurt people, that might have been an issue. they did nerf swarm later but its still pretty good and worth having, maybe Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Dec 9, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2015 23:37
|
|
|
the most pointlessly vindictive mechanic I've seen in a game, that
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2016 13:02
|
|
|
i remember making an effortpost on their steam feedback forums bitching about their love of purplish grey monotony for scenery. and love of fog. I made a few effort posts about the game. The one time I managed to get a point across and acknowledged was when dodge and parry did the exact same thing, which meant giving a choice between them was completely banal when a player would just go with the better %. I had to reiterate that point twice before I got a merely evasive and cagey reply instead of a banal dismissive one. e: other things I remembered kvetching about: morale, rout tests, the interface, obfuscated math, skills, armour, weapons, wounds, static nature of combat Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jan 8, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 14:54
|
|
|
I played this again a bit; I haven't played since before they added deployment. Deployment actually helps a lot in alleviating this games most stupid moments/mechanics, since you're able to kind of set up a cohesive battle plan with your dudes (allowing you to actually try to give them purposes instead of trying to do that and watching them be put in really lovely positions that they can't accomplish poo poo from) and avoids some of the most egregious fuckery, although some mission deployment types are still bullshit; the one where both warbands deploy in 3 teams is really awful, since you wind up getting a dude piled on and there's really nothing you can do to stop from getting them rocked. The control interface for deploying is garbage. I think the biggest thing that keeps coming up, in terms of my thoughts on why this game is so mediocre, is the real lack of counterplay. First, you never really know what you're up against, or the lay of the land you're going to be fighting in, so your only real option with your team is to tailor it to be as good in all situations as possible so when you stumble into a fight, you'll probably win. That means a lot of the niche skills are pretty much worthless since they require particular situations to be useful and you're left mostly in the dark in how impactful they really are. Jaw Strike, for instance, requires you to get a particular dude in melee range with a spellcaster to give them a higher chance of a misfire; you don't know really if this is going to really do anything for you even if it all works out perfectly and there's a multitude of situations where it probably won't, and you're also sacrificing skill points for this niche skill when you could get something like "parry/dodge 5% better in all situations" which is still "eh" but it at least has more obvious benefit. But wait, you say, if you go very parry heavy, don't you stand the risk of the enemy going anti-parry? Well, no, because you can't tell how enemies are built until you're actually already hitting them, and you can't see their skills very easily either, so trying to counter setups requires you to set up your dudes ahead of time for the express purpose of countering a particular style, which you don't know the enemy will employ, and even if they do employ it, doesn't actually counter them that much. Countering parry, for instance, requires taking skills that reduce it, and taking weapons that reduce it, while the parry heavy foe is going to be using weapons that are better at actually killing you, and losing 20% of 65% parry is going to bother them a lot less than someone losing 20% of 25% parry anyways. Its a lot of assumptions and tinkering and it doesn't really accomplish what you want, compared to just making your guys generally better in all situations anyways. This sort of dumb waste-of-time bullshit permeates so many skills and systems in the game. Like you can build a guy based around reducing enemy initiative, and... they'll get the poo poo beaten out of them by the enemy who has lower initiative anyways but is better at fighting. You can make a guy who can tank via taunting and some other skills... and they'll get the poo poo beaten out of them since they wasted their skills on their weird niche role instead of taking skills that make them fight better. Combat is just such a straightforward HP grind that anything that doesn't make your foes HP go down faster compared to yours is irrelevant, and there's really no sort of room for some tactical coups or misplays aside from "hit single foe with a lot of my guys", which is still just playing into the damage race combat, rather than really adding depth to it. That's really the problem with the design mentality they took with this game, with all its granular stat gains and fiddly skills that everyone shares. It results in a very flat, simple system with a strong focus on generalist minmaxing. They really, really should have cribbed more notes from the XCOM remakes, where they eschewed the RPG stat poo poo and generalist dudes in favor of fewer, more impactful skills and clearly defined roles; it ends up creating a lot more room for experimentation and composition. XCOM also gives a bit more of a "breather" between encountering enemies and actually engaging them, in that the UI promotes being able to look at foes and see their capabilities, and you have a lot more ability to maneuver and come up with a plan or action. It also had its cover system, with flanking and such, that allowed such maneuvering to matter, had skills and abilities that added power beyond "does more damage on average", a damage/HP system that allowed less predictable outcomes based around player action rather than HP grinding combat that is so predictable and inflexible in outcome you could write an algorithm to predict the winner, weapons and characters that had roles so dudes were situationally powerful rather than just generally powerful, and encouraged thinking of a team as a sum of its parts rather than just individually powerful dudes. Mordheim, in contrast, usually winds up in a situation where an enemy appears, you have no clue what they can do or how to play against it aside from the most broad strokes (with "surround and kill it" being the solution 99 times out of 100), and they often just charge and start hitting a guy which really undermines much in terms of "plan of attack". The initiative system really sucks in this regard, since you often just have to make do with whatever guy you have on hand since coordination is a pain and you can't really wait for a guy to set up things or act in a particular role. words words words words words. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Mar 20, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2016 06:51
|
|
|
eh, I haven't picked it up. I don't like going for mastery skills since they tend to cost too much and offer fairly diminished returns on the investment. the only exceptions are for attack skills since you want to squeeze value out of your attacks, but for passives its probably better to go broad. I've been playing skaven, and I totally agree that the skills just sucking is one of the biggest detriments to the game. Not only are they just number fuckery rather than offering new choices and options, but when I'm picking a skill, I find myself aggressively hunting just for something that doesn't suck. Most active skills are hot goddamn garbage (the entire alertness tree is worthless. Not just niche or not worth it whatever, just pure worthless). It also doesn't help that the training time/cost mechanic is borked in that the higher tier skills are not really much better than the lower tier ones, which makes you gravitate towards the cheaper ones which just further trashes on variety (not to mention lessens the pain when the character gets some -OP injury and becomes totally worthless). In contrast to listing all the bad skills, here's the skills I actually bother getting, because im stuck in a place and im bored. quote:Mighty Charge - Charges a target at normal range +4 meters. The Charge has a -30% chance to hit, deals +75% damage, and bypasses 10% of the target's Parry chance.. Charges trade 1OP for 50% damage and less chance to hit, so they're generally not worth doing unless you're getting past an ambush or you got an extra OP to burn. This makes charges actually worth it overall, provided you have other skills and a high enough melee ability that make it so you can actually loving hit. Worth upgrading. I've got a rat focused on charges and he typically hits at 85% with it. Its worth getting even if you're not focusing on charging, imo, just to take advantage of stunned foes or if you've got some means to trash their melee resist (generally not since those skills don't do much). Aaaaand that's it. Those are the only skills in the game that I think are worth getting. There's some spellcaster only stuff I haven't managed to really look at and you can probably build some Ambush build like a Charge build and get value out of that but ambushing is so janky I'd not recommend it. There's a few other skills I'd like to try like Overpower combined with Vital Strike or some poo poo but it costs a lot of money and time to train it so I don't bother. Everything else is Bad or requires dumping points into stats which are Bad. And only like, one or two of these actually offer anything new in terms of choices or options, the rest just improve numbers. Which is lame. I think one of the big weaknesses of the AI is that they don't understand this and instead build their skills based on their "roles" so you have dudes outfitted with a bunch of things like "climb better" or "improve initiative for a round" while a player has things like "hit enemy harder" and "get hit less" and the AI doesn't minmax stats which means that even with the x% bonus to health and damage, they still come up short. Another comment is just how big a trap some of the options in the game are. Building leadership, for instance, improves your teams morale, and has a few skills that do nothing but grant bonus morale. YOU DO NOT WANT HIGH TEAM MORALE. High morale means that if you're losing, more of your poor fuckers have to die before the game lets go of your balls and lets you actually leave the battle without punishing you. Its only situationally useful if you're in some grind down to the last man, but generally once a team is down in manpower it rapidly becomes one sided due to the damage race mechanics and the All Alone checks. You still probably want to skill up leadership after int so your dudes can sometimes fight ogres and beasts without pissing themselves. Other thoughts: Injuries are a white elephant mechanic. They're incredibly uninteresting and don't do anything mechanically except make losing teams eat even more poo poo. In Blood Bowl open leagues they cause people to concede matches in rapid fire succession instead of playing matches they might lose, so to counter that the designers of this game implemented a mechanic that inflicts injuries on EVERYONE on your team if you dare leave a losing fight without getting your requisite wedgie. Shouldn't that have been a massive red flag to them that there's something critically wrong in the design when people don't want to play your game? XCOM has permadeath but XCOM is PVE, has a means to mitigate chances of death via medkits, promotes the idea of cutting and running, and while less leveled replacements are not as good as high level dudes, its not nearly the same sort of yawning chasm as in Mordheim, where a higher level dude is objectively better in every way than a replacement to the point where a level 0 guy is going to die horribly to a level 10 one with absolute, 100% certainty (XCOM levels add health, aim, and skills that add options. Mordheim levels add health, skills that flatly improve attributes, chance to hit, chance to dodge/Dodge/Parry, damage, number of attacks, movement distance, etc, and the combat mechanics are much more determined by dice rolls and numbers than in XCOM, further accentuating the importance of levels) , and costs a shitload of gold and time to train. You can hire replacements that are higher level, but that costs gold, which you won't have if you're in a losing spiral, and the game is seemingly set up to promote death spirals as a matter of course. The losing team already loses out on wyrdstone, items, and money, what actually gets added by punishing them even more? Its garbage, borne from chasing the dragon of "realism" and an obsessive need to roll on random tables for everything. e: checking some guides, other recommended skills are Adrenaline Rush for 3OP for 60HP (eh), Frenzy (lose stances and gain 15% damage), Daredevil (waste 3OP for 125% damage boost but give foes dodge and lose 15% melee resist). The idea is to daredevil, burn 60HP for more OP, then hit things. Comparing things, suppose you got, uh, 7OP and a 1handed weapon; you can do unmastered strong blow and then hit twice for 3.5[w] damage, or do mastered daredevil and hit twice for 4.5[w]. Using the upgraded adrenaline on both makes it 5[w] vs 6.75[w]. 60 damage is kind of a lot, though, and giving free dodges is potentially really annoying. And it also means that you need 15str and 12tou, 12 skill points, and a lot of gold to pull it off so its pretty much theoretical until the very late game. So I'm still going to claim strong blow is better because its only 2 skill points and I'm too dumb/lazy to have figured out that daredevil didn't suck. Still it seems to be the ~meta~ so its probably the way to go, and people have gotten damage in the range of like 400-600 by exploiting it so uhhh thats a thing. it was from early access so maybe thats not possible anymore, idk. that kind of highlights a big problem of "hard power" buffs in game like "do 125% extra damage" versus "soft power" like "move further" which are powerful things only in a certain context and depend on player utilization instead of knowing the right minmax skill combo. even with their ultra conservative mindset with skills, they still managed to get people to break poo poo over their knee. i saw some dev asking "how did you do that?" in the steam forum about it which was pretty funny to me. it seems to me that a lot of times devs like to put on blinders about this sort of poo poo rather than thinking ruthlessly about how to exploit their systems; the consistently awful default builds in games tends to reflect that, since they're created based on how devs would like to think their game works, rather than what actually works. mordhiem's AI doesn't have a "if skill == skill_staggering_blow then return false" clause when considering what skills to use probably indicates that such a problem exists here. Frenzy mastered is popular as well because 30% extra damage is nothing to scoff at, but you lose your stances, which might not matter. crit builds can get something like 40-60% chance to crit on a good day. using adrenaline rush + fatality or its ranged equivalent lets you improve the odds. my own experience with accuracy didnt work out well since the rear end in a top hat involved couldnt hit poo poo but maybe not being an idiot helps here. The guides also also recommend upgraded alertness tho which I don't get. Initiative is pointless after turn 1 and often before then as well. The big draw seems to be Alertness, which gives melee resist (10%/20%), so you'd combine it with frenzy to make up for the loss of stance. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Mar 21, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2016 08:02
|
|
|
falling down is super neutered, since it does around 7-11 damage and dudes have 150ish to 500 health. did have an AI sister kill herself by failing to climb a wall after I shot her a bunch tho. tbh despite all my kvetching im coming around a bit on the game. still a lot of really terrible stupid design decisions and the level of pointless complexity, slowness, and jankyness is something that'd make me not want to ever recommend someone getting this game, but i keep loving playing it for some reason. i enjoy the incremental customization of dudes and exploiting bad AI i guess; now that im high level im playing mainly brutal missions since more skill points overall just mean more room for the AI to put points into the multitude of worthless skills (to the point where my warpguards are pretty capable of soloing some enemy heroes despite the OP deficit since the hero oftentimes is some 8 melee 10 ranged 8 accuracy fuckshit armed with a dagger and mastered careful approach/quick draw/knowledge:ambush/staggering blow or some other poo poo). dudes also gain around half their total skill points at levels 8-10 for some reason. that, along with enough OP/SP to make using skills worth it (blowing 4OP to boost damage is a lot more sane when you have 9OP instead of, say, 4OP) means that you can actually build your dudes into some roles that let let them do something other than "hit man for damage" and "try not to die", like "this dude charges"/"this dude defends flank with ambush"/"this dude is harder to hit and so stands next to thing that hits hard"/"this dude throws poo poo six times a turn and does 250+ damage easy because this game is loving dumb". i mean its not crazy or diverse or anything but its something. idk why they don't take some of those later skill points and use them to make characters more distinct and role-based via default skills but who loving knows, they'd probably pick bad skills anyways. like poo poo even impressives are just complete tabula rasa that are distinct mainly by hitting like trucks and having a lot of health and nothing else. i sprung 3 bucks for the character dlc and its actually kind of interesting. the characters are actually unique and have distinct skills and abilities compared to other units which blew my loving mind. half to 3/4 the unique skills are hot garbage of course. the skaven/chaos globe thrower, for instance, has a skill that can assign some random debuff to an area (literally randomly chosen from around three lackluster ones and one good one; inconsistent garbage), throws a gas bomb that poisons an area (that does at most 30 damage for standing it in, which is totally irrelevant), some passives that reduce poison resistance by 10% when throwing globes, reduces melee resist by 5% in an area,... or can throw a globe that, when upgraded, heals 30 wounds to everyone in an area at the cost of 3OP what the gently caress. The only other healing ability I know about is a SoS spell that can heal 20/40 to allies in a smaller aoe (and there's a failure mod and curse chance that rises the more you use it) and it costs 4OP. The gas gives a warp debuff as well and can heal enemies but 1. who cares and 2. you can aim it so as long as youre not a dipshit youll be fine. poo poo if you give them introspection/adrenaline rush they can chuck six of those things a round for 180 health AoE heal. and it can't fail, and its infinite. the devs must have gone nuts or something, adding dude that can be a "medic", that's seriously hosed up and imbalancing, to have a character capable of doing a not-damaging thing that isn't ADJUST STAT X or IF Y THEN ADJUST STAT X that no other character can do. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Mar 24, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 08:34
|
|
|
I played a bit the other day after the update; they got the DLC guys as part of the AI warbands, which is nice. The AI still is very bad tho so eh. Early game they can sometimes be hard, but later on, thanks to being stupid and having bad builds, they're not that scary even on Deadly. I also completed the campaign as the Skaven, and this game holds a cherished spot in my heart of being one of the more bullshit experiences I've had in games outside of like, actual rougelikes, which is great. I learned one limitation of relying on parry, for instance, is that all the big boss enemies straight up ignore parry, including one level that was pretty much nothing but units that didn't care about parry. That wouldn't be so bad if the game would be nice and inform you of these things in some more obvious form other than some buried tooltip in the rear end end of their UI that you can't check until Mr Demon Shitfucker, whom youve never seen before you dared to step past a corner and have it ambush you, is already balls deep, and also wasn't extremely loving fiddly about Disengage so you can have guys get stuck fighting some fuckoff monstrosity and not being able to do much other than die since there is a small box a foot behind them that is entombing them. One mission had an enemy monster respawn immediately after killed, get a free action at the end of the round, could teleport, then it also got to first at the next round, which was really cheeky and awesome and didn't annoy me much at all when it pasted a dude because of that (turns out the correct solution was to station a rat with Head Shot nearby and stun it repeatedly and turn the whole thing into a bit of a joke). The last mission also featured a manticore that spawned without much warning when I picked up an amulet; my leader got crit and stunned off somewhere else on that turn which sucked but wasn't a big deal. The manticore got an free action at the end of the round, which made it take off into the air, which was an ability that was, uh, unexpected. Next round, it goes first, lands next to my leader, and mulches him. I don't really mind that they had the capacity to do things like that (although the game doing the dumb "let enemy get two turns in a row when they first spawn because of initiative stupidity" is genuinely boneheaded design), but its really annoying when games do poo poo that does not much else except serve as a big cheap shot once due to lack of information available to the player. It's like a Dungeon and Dragons GM throwing Rust Monsters at unaware guys because ha ha gently caress you guys ha ha i run a hardcore game experience dont you loving forget; it doesn't actually offer much of anything of interest past that point aside from mandating some single precaution to avoid being hosed. The manticore was also a really lovely boss for this game, as it was a big pile of hitpoints designed to be a big as a pain in the rear end as possible to fight. It was, of course, immune to crits, stunning, and really most anything else you'd care to try to inflict on it since that would trivialize it (so if you have any guys built to do that w h o o p s they're worthless and there was no way at all of knowing this ahead of time (oh and if you withdraw from this fight because you brought the wrong dudes and you're outmatched gently caress you all your guys get injuries (unless you just get the random dramatis persona or whatever dude killed but please don't do that i guess))). So you had to just surround it and beat the poo poo out it for around eight rounds while it poo poo out AoE attacks which you would just take because otherwise it would rend the everliving poo poo out of one dude; there's no way to control what it does because the game lacks any sort of taunt/guard or whatever mechanic or any sort of interesting CC stuff at all. Its an enemy almost designed to highlight all the bad things about the system and none of the redeeming elements. They wanted some big setpeice baddie to fight, the game system actually doesn't cope at all with the idea of that, and they just went gently caress IT GIVE IT A LITERAL THOUSAND HITPOINTS AND IMMUNITY TO EVERYTHING gently caress THE PLAYER. anyways i played this a lot more than i should have because im a sick idiot who gets sick pleasure of beating up bad AI and never losing a single fight ever. if you want to own, just go frenzy/overpower/mighty charge and whatever increases charge accuracy/crit rate and hit for 300 damage total a turn because you don't have to give a gently caress. also go adrenaline rush/whatever gives bonus crit chance per ranged attack/better reload and use a bow/shuriken and hit like eight loving times a turn for 300 damage again and win the game, because its a badly designed turd that hates you but is also incapable of hurting you because all the AI's mans are too busy running into the mist using careful approach and +initiative buffs on each other in lieu of fighting. you can also build dudes that do other things i guess but actually, don't. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Jun 23, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2016 07:38
|
|
|
yeah it's certified Not Good.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
i had fun at times with this game, but it is deeply, deeply flawed and i would never recommend it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2017 20:49
|
|
|
the game isn't hard. it is overly complex, and is frequently total bullshit, but i never lost a mission. and that includes the story missions which are designed to gently caress you up with cheap gotcha gimmicks. positioning is a super easy problem. group up, guard a choke, surround, kill. the AI is relentlessly incompetent and will trickle in, so not much else is needed. the more important thing is knowing the solution to how to level your guys, so you can murder pretty much any regular enemy with two charges or whatever. early game is much harder due to lacking developed dudes. i enjoy beating up terrible AI and pretending i'm kick rear end so that was entertaining at least. itd be interesting to see if playing against actual people would help or hurt the gameplay Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 11, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2017 21:49
|
|
|
I think a problem with Mordheim rng is that there's so much of it permeated into the system, and very little of it can shift a battle on its own, that the game actually ends up becoming very deterministic. For instance, let's do a little test battle, Dude Vs Guy. Dude goes first, hits 50% of the time. Guy hits 70% of the time. If you ask someone incredibly naive about probability what the chances were on which side winning, they'd probably settle on something based on the 20% difference and think that means a 20% difference in chance to win. But in practice, it doesn't work anything like that: the important factor is how many times a person needs to get hit, since the higher that is, the more and more oppressive that 20% difference becomes in who gets to win. Even knowing a bit about probability, its kind of nuts how deterministic it gets. I ran a little thing that does 10,000 fights and gives a number. Assuming 1 hit = 1 hp... At 1 HP, Dude wins 58.88%% of the time. At 2 HP, Dude wins 42.39% At 5 HP, Dude wins 25.910% At 10 HP, Dude wins 13.74% At around 40 HP, Dude ends up having a less than 1% chance of winning. This isn't really a summation of Mordheim's battle system in its entirety of course, since there's also stances, damage ranges, crit chances, and a few other bits, but that's just more rng on rng: it doesn't increase randomness, it decreases it. And even if a single combatant lucks out and wins, there's still more and more rng checks going on in all the other fights and there sheer amount buries variance in outcome. Even the unexpected wins have their "snowball" factor reduced: if the lucky winner came out fit as a fiddle, that'd be one thing, but its much more likely they'll have their HP ground down to a slim margin, meaning that its impact on the probability of the outcome is lessened quite a bit. Two equally skilled players playing against each other would not break even: one side would win considerably more than the other. So, ultimately, the rng in Mordheim totally fails in achieving the often stated ideal of rng in strategy games (adding "swingyness", "variance", making combat "realistically" random, or allowing a weaker player to sometimes beat a stronger one), and its instead a smothering factor that stacks the deck immensely towards one side: the only advantage compared to an actual rng-less and deterministic system is disguising that fact from the player. e: Oh yeah, and if the Dude that hits first has a higher hit % than the Guy who hits second, then Guy is pretty royally screwed. It gets worse as the average % to hit gets higher: 5% v 5% is dead even, 95% v 95% is around 80% in Dude's favor. Probability is fun, I guess: I try to respect its power. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Feb 27, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2017 10:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
i got my money's worth out of this game, i just find it fun to try to break down stuff in games to try to understand them past "it was fun / it wasn't fun". mordheim hit kind of a sweet spot of mediocrity where the problems holding it back are interesting design issues rather than stuff like "its coded like poo poo and was a terrible idea to begin with".
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2017 12:05
|
|