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 Well I was browsing steam today and to my surprise my favorite strategy game (that isnt crusader kings) got a sequel released. While I was making GBS threads my pants GBS-style, my wallet tore itself out of my manpurse and flew to Russia at relativistic speeds. For those of you not in the know King's Bounty is a tactical strategy game that borrows A LOT from heroes of might and magic. The reason for that is that HoMM was actually original based on the very first King's Bounty. HoMM went on to focus more on town building and other pussy rear end poo poo while the franchise reboot (which this is the third iteration of) kept the same rogue-like overworld feel. The parallel between the two franchises being the tactical combat. How does King's Bounty play? The overworld which you spend about half your time in is composed of a whole bunch of poo poo from buildings, taverns for recruiting monsters to your army, loot, quests and encounters. You build a mercenary army of sorts and then fight these encounters while trying to to explore and conquer whatever territory you are in. I compared it to a roguelike because the resources and encounters are mostly randomized and its very possible to get yourself into a game-losing scenario (where you have no money to hire creatures and no way possible to beat the armies in your way). Overworld exploration satisfies a lot of the same things for me that rogue-like exploration does in the 'oh gently caress thank god i needed that 1000 gold so loving badly' sense. The combat is sort of like HoMM3 the most. It is a hex based playing field where units are represented as little armies full of a # of units. There are is shitton of variety when it comes to units and flavor and unit abilities that keeps the combat always interesting. You also have to be fairly careful in not only winning but making sure you dont lose too much in the process. What does Warrior's of the North bring to the table? code:    Videos PLZ Hilarious overly-dramatic trailer with gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsA2tAzOq4 HD gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-KVtIFhQ8M
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Oct 27, 2012 20:57
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The game is pretty fun, but I've been finding that it's quite a bit easier than Armored Princess since not only are all the encounters for the first couple of isles listed as weaker than you, the viking units are ridiculously strong. Though I haven't completed Fastland or that place with all of the jotun, so maybe this is just a prelude to an rear end-beating. The new units while pretty drat strong, are fun to use. The Soothsayer is fun to wreak havoc with using Loki's Touch to set a troop to uncontrollable status, then watch as the a.i dogpiles the troop. Berserker's are retardedly strong too, since they have high crit, decent health and counter attack counter attacks. Honestly, for anyone that enjoyed HoMM, Advance Wars or any other turn based strategy game, they should take a look at the King's Bounty series in general, it's really well done (though the newest still has a patch or two to go to fix all of the typo's and some of the buggy Skald songs), also very challenging (though I wouldn't say to the point where you can create an un-winnable situation, which you would really have to work to achieve)
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Oct 27, 2012 21:49
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King's Bounty games are a gift from Mother Russia and its a privilege to play them. I'm surprised: either I wasn't paying attention, or this game had no hype at all and came out of the blue. I thought we had lost the KB title to whatever stupid MMOG idea they mentioned a few years ago.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:52
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In my experience, KB games just pop out of the ground like this when you least expect it.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:54
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Pumpkinreaper posted:The game is pretty fun, but I've been finding that it's quite a bit easier than Armored Princess since not only are all the encounters for the first couple of isles listed as weaker than you, the viking units are ridiculously strong. What difficulty are you playing on? I just finished playing through the tutorial and it gives you a ridiculous amount of gold (which seems like it has to be a bug.) Also the typos are all really hilarious. I find the translation in general really loving funny in these games. They obviously dont take the story at all serious and just in general have fun with everything. edit: The music is sorta catchy too so far MOVIE MAJICK fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Oct 27, 2012 |
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Oct 27, 2012 22:01
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Pumpkinreaper posted:The game is pretty fun, but I've been finding that it's quite a bit easier than Armored Princess since not only are all the encounters for the first couple of isles listed as weaker than you, the viking units are ridiculously strong. That's good to hear. I didn't get far in Armored Princess because of the difficulty.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:03
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One Legged Cat posted:In my experience, KB games just pop out of the ground like this when you least expect it. I was pretty excited for Armored Princess for a long time. I didn't even know they were planning on making another KB game until I saw it pop up on Steam.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:13
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Node posted:King's Bounty games are a gift from Mother Russia and its a privilege to play them. I'm surprised: either I wasn't paying attention, or this game had no hype at all and came out of the blue. I thought we had lost the KB title to whatever stupid MMOG idea they mentioned a few years ago. The MMO is still in development. Katuri, the developers of the first two modern KB games are still working on it. This new game is made by a lovely internal studio 1C uses to make their lovely cash-in sequels. The terrible Men of War stand-alone expansion/sequel was made by them. That, along with concerns about game difficulty and balance has me staying away from this one for the time being.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:24
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The MMO is still in development. Katuri, the developers of the first two modern KB games are still working on it. This new game is made by a lovely internal studio 1C uses to make their lovely cash-in sequels. The terrible Men of War stand-alone expansion/sequel was made by them. Oh gently caress me.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:29
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WYA posted:What difficulty are you playing on? I just finished playing through the tutorial and it gives you a ridiculous amount of gold (which seems like it has to be a bug.) Hard, also yeah, I noticed that you get a ridiculous amount of gold at the start too (20k I believe), but you get so much early on that it doesn't matter, before I'd even finished the second area I had around 100k. The translation can be pretty funny at times too, but it also makes it really hard to tell what some abilities do. As for King's Bounty: Armored Princess, it wasn't that it was difficult, it was just that early on it has really bad pacing for enemies, so that for a few levels you have to jump between islands, trying to find enemies that are easy enough for you to kill so you can move on to the next area and so on.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:32
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The MMO is still in development. Katuri, the developers of the first two modern KB games are still working on it. This new game is made by a lovely internal studio 1C uses to make their lovely cash-in sequels. The terrible Men of War stand-alone expansion/sequel was made by them.  I love the KB games a lot (it also happens to be one of the few games that can run on my old and crummy laptop) but I guess I'll just wait until this drops down to 5 bucks.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:36
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Well I'd love to hear from people who have purchased this game to see how it compares to AP, or KB: The Legend, and tell us if its a horrible unrecognizable mess. Or if it still has awesome music, funny and weird dialog, good gameplay, etc. Thanks in advance!!!
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Oct 27, 2012 22:42
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The MMO is still in development. Katuri, the developers of the first two modern KB games are still working on it. This new game is made by a lovely internal studio 1C uses to make their lovely cash-in sequels. The terrible Men of War stand-alone expansion/sequel was made by them. 1C is the new 3DO officially, now. True heirs of the Kings Bounty throne! (First 2 games still own)
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Oct 27, 2012 22:44
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The MMO is still in development. Katuri, the developers of the first two modern KB games are still working on it. This new game is made by a lovely internal studio 1C uses to make their lovely cash-in sequels. The terrible Men of War stand-alone expansion/sequel was made by them. Eh, I'm almost done the first island and I'd say the pacing is definitely an improvement on AP. It is also going to be hard as gently caress now for those of you who like to do the impossible no-loss runs. I was talking to a big King's Bounty nerd (hes already halfway through the game  ) and he said the balance might be even better than AP, apparently they improved on a lot of the Crossworlds stuff.edit: that's combat balance not the ridiculous gold you get. Node posted:Well I'd love to hear from people who have purchased this game to see how it compares to AP, or KB: The Legend, and tell us if its a horrible unrecognizable mess. Or if it still has awesome music, funny and weird dialog, good gameplay, etc. First island and it still has all three qualities of AP at TL. (The music might even be better) MOVIE MAJICK fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Oct 27, 2012 |
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Oct 27, 2012 22:46
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Node posted:Well I'd love to hear from people who have purchased this game to see how it compares to AP, or KB: The Legend, and tell us if its a horrible unrecognizable mess. Or if it still has awesome music, funny and weird dialog, good gameplay, etc. I'm only in the middle of the second island and I have 150k gold with the difficulty set to Hard. Echo'ing the comment that the viking unit base is really strong and it feels like you have all the tools to actually play the intro game. Sounds like they've taken the entire AP soundtrack and also introduced new soundtracks. I've heard a lot of familiar tracks, although oddly placed sometimes. The pirate island theme from AP appears in the weirdest places like fights.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:52
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Rascyc posted:It's pretty much everything AP was with a much gentler difficulty curve. There's plethora of really weird dialog (I read about half of it, and skip the other half). Also they took Paladins and gave them another unique ability in the form of pre-battle buff songs that scale. I'm playing this class personally after not seeing any big changes with mages and runic magic looked boring. Yeah I really like how you dont start with an army of poo poo-head peasants and footmen and actually have a bunch of tools at your disposal in the beginning. Hopefully it does actually get more challenging later on. I found AP had the opposite problem, where halfway through Verona and into the midgame it got a bit too easy, even on hard.
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Oct 27, 2012 23:06
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I knew this game was coming more than other people in this thread, just in the fact that I randomly Googled a couple weeks ago to see if a new one was coming out, since this game series is so beautiful. And this one is no exception.Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:That, along with concerns about game difficulty and balance has me staying away from this one for the time being. Literally everything I can find, except I guess the difficulty (but ... well, I will get back to that) is in keeping with the previous games. The dialogue is still that same mysterious mix of "occasional super-generic and grammatically incorrect main story" and "memorably witty and even poignant situations/conversations" like they have two writers and only pay one of them. The difficulty, yes, I suppose now that you mention it, it is kind of funny that the army you are geared towards leading is actually pretty good; it is a far cry from stringing together an awful hodgepodge of plants, dragonflies, and wolves to flesh out your two elderly bowmen or whatever you have. BUT, if you play the game at all like me, the only real difference is how quickly things feel manageable--I always just cruised around every island avoiding combats and looting the environment, and only actually started fighting things once I was overmatched for everything. This game just makes it quicker to overmatch things (if you are trying). But given that you get upgraded by the third little island to a flying horse I have the feeling that the difficulty is going to go ridiculous places soon, given that when you finally received that in the last game, it seemed like you were basically invincible and the game was nearly over. Edit: Oh, and one of my favorite new things, both because the game benefits from them and because it is something every game should do, is the mini-achievement system that actually gives you in-game rewards for doing things (there is also a bigger achievement system and I do not know if that does anything yet), so for example I just killed my first dragon in the same combat where I killed my hundredth vampire, and so I now get 5% extra damage against dragon and also a permanent +1 attack (not just against vampires but it came from that), and the vampire accomplishment also triggers another mini-quest when the Vampire Hunter Society contacts you via a technological divination device and gives you a job!. Basically this game rules Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 00:43
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Yeah, I'm three hours and two islands into the game and it's more of the same of Armored Princess/Crossworlds, which is a good thing. Honestly, it's a formula that's pretty foolproof and the new devs seem to have been faithful to the original games with a fresh, balanced campaign; things have been challenging but not frustratingly so, I haven't hit that early game wall yet. The new mechanics of skald songs and rune magic are good but not overpowering (so far) and serve as solid supplements to the already existing magic and rage systems. As stated, the Viking units are pretty powerful but still require judicious use of their special abilities. I'd even argue that they are a more balanced race than the newer Orcs introduced in Crossworlds (which had stupidly broken poo poo like a surviving one-unit stack of goblin shamans able to wipe out a third of your uber stack because you killed everything else and gave them tons of adrenaline). The storyline is a wash for me, the original games weren't works of Shakespeare and WotN is equally goofy as hell. The important thing for me is the gameplay which is very fun. TLDR: buy it right now if you've played the original games to death and are jonesing for a new campaign, or wait for the inevitable sale a couple of months down the line.
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Oct 28, 2012 01:17
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Quarex posted:Edit: Oh, and one of my favorite new things, both because the game benefits from them and because it is something every game should do, is the mini-achievement system that actually gives you in-game rewards for doing things (there is also a bigger achievement system and I do not know if that does anything yet), so for example I just killed my first dragon in the same combat where I killed my hundredth vampire, and so I now get 5% extra damage against dragon and also a permanent +1 attack (not just against vampires but it came from that), and the vampire accomplishment also triggers another mini-quest when the Vampire Hunter Society contacts you via a technological divination device and gives you a job!. Basically this game rules This existed in the last game too 
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Oct 28, 2012 01:20
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moot the hopple posted:TLDR: buy it right now if you've played the original games to death and are jonesing for a new campaign, or wait for the inevitable sale a couple of months down the line. Done. I will never be able to resist a KB game. They'd have to turn it into a cover shooter to make me not give them my money.
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Oct 28, 2012 01:21
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Ha. You people talking about a gentler difficulty curve. Wait until you get to the first boss, which is on the fourth island. You'll know it because it is big, and because you can't use rage abilities. That thing is a massive difficulty wall, or at least it was for my warrior on hard. It took me a good bit of leveling and planning to be able to beat it at level 17, and I only just squeaked though with some polar bears left. I did get the achievement for beating it in under 15 turns though, mostly due to two castings of mass bless. You are right that money gets thrown at you though. I have more than a half million, and not much to spend it on. The actual difficulty curve less that boss is a lot better than AP/crossworlds though. The whole navigation chart kiting game was lame. The 'impossible no loss' runs people strangely seemed to gravitate to were super lame too, involving hours of kiting, collecting poo poo and doing the combatless quests before you actually did any fighting. Thankfully it doesn't look like that is how it works now. My run is far from 'no loss', but I am doing my best to try to work on the grand strategist medal, and am currently at 92/100 lossless fights for rank three of the thing. I mostly did that by leaving some groups alone on earlier islands while I pressed ahead in the quest, often killing a lot of my troops in the process. Once I gained some power, I would go back to an earlier island and mop up. Even then it often isn't easy to win those fights without losing anything. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 01:27
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Filthy Monkey posted:Ha. You people talking about a gentler difficulty curve. Wait until you get to the first boss, which is on the fourth island. You'll know it because it is big, and because you can't use rage abilities. That thing is a massive difficulty wall, or at least it was for my warrior on hard. It took me a good bit of leveling and planning to be able to beat it at level 17, and I only just squeaked though with some polar bears left. In that case, I'm going to throw berserkers  at it until it ceases to exist(Seriously, they loving tear through poo poo like nobodies business) Pumpkinreaper fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 01:32
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Pumpkinreaper posted:In that case, I'm going to throw berserkers I was lucky to finally find a bless scroll in a random combat chest in one of the last fights I did before the boss too. I was freaking hurting for that spell. It immediately made me max out order magic. Lets face it, when you are the assbeater class, making all of your troops do max damage is a pretty good use of your spellcasting. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 01:43
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I'm 10 hours in and the game is good (and getting better). Some points: 1) Exploration is much better since they (mostly) got rid of lovely kiting minigame. It's not necessary to steal flags and runes from high level islands anymore, but it's still possible to do if you want to. 2) I started on Hard, played for two hours and restarted on Impossible as a Paladin. Game is easier so far, Impossible seems to be an equivalent of Hard in Princess. 3) I like Viking armies a lot. So far I've seen about 10 new creatures and the same amount of new spells. I hope I'll get an opportunity to use insane Dinosaur armies from Princess  4) First 4 islands suffer from the lack of troop variety. I have a lot of vikings, a handful of pirates and animals and that's about it. I think I saw some dwarf troops somewhere, but I wish I'd had more choices. This is a minor complaint, but honestly it's pretty hard to get a no losses medal with viking armies since they tend to die a lot.
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Oct 28, 2012 01:56
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I haven't unlocked any rage skills beyond the first one, but holy crap the animation for that first rage skill is clunky and embarrassing. Guess it's because it's some different folks that worked on this one? I am about 4 hours in and I'm enjoying it, though I wish it was less linear (There have been multiple cases where I went exploring and found enemies I could not fight even though it's really obvious I have to fight them down the line because the quest line talked about them). I think it's mostly that I like AP's island system a lot, especially since the main quest let you do things in any order you pleased. I like AP/Crossworlds more so far, but this one isn't bad at all. I just wish it took less time to really open up the world.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:01
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Yeah, the first thing I did after my first fight was turn on fast animations immediately. It carries over to your rage powers and stuff too but it's pretty mandatory.Srice posted:I like AP/Crossworlds more so far, but this one isn't bad at all. I just wish it took less time to really open up the world.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:13
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Amamake posted:I'm 10 hours in and the game is good (and getting better). I might restart on impossible too, I felt like Hard on AP was just the perfect amount of difficulty. Does anyone know how the hell the rune system works? Is there a limited supply? Can you keep buffing your troops over and over?
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Oct 28, 2012 02:21
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Yeah they replenish every fight. Just use them regularly. You can cast a spell to give your soldiers more runes too.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:24
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Each troop as a supply of each rune type which is reset after each battle. I think they typically have one of each, but Soothsayers give all Vikings one extra of each. You can see this on the tooltip for Runic magic on the troop's detail box. Not sure if Runes stack, but it seems possible to activate more than 1 type per round.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:24
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Can't believe I didn't hear anything about the first game, since I got into the latest HoMM after buying Disciples III. ( ) Should I start with Armored Princess or jump straight into this?
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Oct 28, 2012 02:47
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Srice posted:I haven't unlocked any rage skills beyond the first one, but holy crap the animation for that first rage skill is clunky and embarrassing. Guess it's because it's some different folks that worked on this one? A buddy and I laughed our asses off at that, since after your hero is done flailing around, it looks like he's running away, realizing that he's in the middle of a group of loving snakes.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:50
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I loved King's Bounty the Legend and Armoured Princess. Just started this one a little while ago and I can't stop playing. One thing I love about the series is the music and they did not disappoint me on this one.
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Oct 28, 2012 02:57
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Can't believe I didn't hear anything about the first game, since I got into the latest HoMM after buying Disciples III. ( Jump straight in, there isnt any continuity from what I can decipher
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Oct 28, 2012 03:30
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When do I get valkyries? is it a plot point, or do I have to use the dork-rage skill X00 times? There looks to be an achievement for not using your rage ability for 50 battles, which would probably be easier doing it against weenie-level skeletons, but if I should be using it every battle, rather than not using it every battle, I probably want to know sooner than later.
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Oct 28, 2012 03:50
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Go to second island, climb mountain right outside town. Get Valkyrie. The latter ones are mostly plot related.
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Oct 28, 2012 04:05
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Filthy Monkey posted:Go to second island, climb mountain right outside town. Get Valkyrie. I got the second one and it absolutely murders EVERYTHING. Also I take back what I said about the difficulty of the game, it's starting to ramp up now, to the point where throwing berserkers at things isn't as cost effective anymore (or time effective..until I bought out a couple of vendors and have them in reserve so they're always at full strength  ), I might have to replace them so I can build up the Master Strategian mini achievement for more leadership.edit: I also like how you get your winged horse, which is basically Christa saying, wait, why did you spend all of that time blowing up all of those rocks when you could FLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Then instead of getting irate about not being told about it, Olaf instead giggles like a 5 year old that just got a real unicorn...or winged horse Pumpkinreaper fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 04:19
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WYA posted:This existed in the last game too  )WYA posted:Jump straight in, there isnt any continuity from what I can decipher Edit: Also worth noting, once armies start running from you for being overmatched, you seemingly get credit for winning without losing any troops, so that is fun. Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Oct 28, 2012 |
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Oct 28, 2012 04:41
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Has anyone figured out how to offer items to the Valkyries? Do you just destroy items?
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Oct 28, 2012 06:17
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Is the overworld navigation/pathfinding any better than before? I remember often having my character run in the exact opposite direction I clicked to go, leading right into Impossible enemies on a regular basis Near everything else I loved about it, though.
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Oct 28, 2012 06:24
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Jetfire posted:Is the overworld navigation/pathfinding any better than before? I remember often having my character run in the exact opposite direction I clicked to go, leading right into Impossible enemies on a regular basis Nope, as bad, possibly worse. I wish there were some way to keep it from rotating the map on me when I am walking, but there isn't anything in the settings other than forcing the minimap to lock facing north. Though monsters patrol, rather than lurk, so you don't accidently pull a big one as often.
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Oct 28, 2012 06:33
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