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What battle difficulty are you playing on? I was sort of surprised when I saw Gunnulf was only injured for a day or two after going down in the mead hall. I would've expected the better part of a week. I play on Hard, though, and I've never quite known how much longer dudes are out for when they go down on that difficulty. It's interesting to see other modes of play, though. I rarely bother with upgrading Armor Break unless the character has decent potential for it (like, maxing out at 4), and Gunnulf doesn't begin to qualify on that front. I'm much more a fan of upping Armor and Strength; high Strength means you only need one or two good armor breaks to get in a decent amount of damage, and high Armor means that one solid hit makes an enemy useless. It often requires some finagling to get enemies to walk into your attack range so you get the first hits in, but on Hard that's served me very well. Exertion rules, though, no arguments there. Never Not Level Exertion, though I tend to do that after getting Armor up to 10-ish. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 03:27
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If there were only one way to build your troops, I'd rag on this game for having lovely balance, so you do what you do.  Also, 3 days? Jeez. I guess Hard just doubles injury times or something, because if I let Gunnulf go down in the mead hall he's sometimes still hurt by the next fight. Fortunately, none of the other characters are in the next fight, so if someone must go down, it can be Anyone But Gunnulf (tm).
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Apr 25, 2014 04:11
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A lot of people dislike the combat because it is anti-logical in a lot of ways when compared to a lot of other SRPGS. If you have two enemies, one strong and one weak, in something like Final Fantasy Tactics, it behooves you to kill the one that is weak quickly so you can focus on the one that is strong. This is not the case in Banner Saga. Unless the enemy is the last one on the field, killing a weak enemy will allow stronger enemies to move more often. There is no speed mechanic or anything like that - one side moves, then the other. Doesn't matter if it is 4v2, turn ratios will still be 1:1, the outnumbered side will effectively move twice as often. The actual ideal move is, when presented with a weak enemy and a strong enemy, is to bash the strong enemy until his Strength is as low as the weak enemy. Then, they are both useless and the danger to you drops to nothing. The critical observation here is that if your Armor is higher than the enemy Strength, he is a non-issue and is essentially wasting turns for your enemy. Generally. There are some enemies with dangerous abilities that they can use while hurt, like the summoner Dredge we saw last mission. You do want to make those priority kill targets. The realistic application for most people is that they will lose a guy or two while outnumbering the enemy, which leaves a really bad taste in your mouth sometimes. This is particularly punishing on Hard, where someone with very high Strength (and therefore, very high utility) can be underpowered for a week or more. You simply do not have time to screw around for a week, waiting for your badasses to sleep off their wounds. Somewhat understandably, the reaction to this was pretty strongly negative for a lot of people. But it's only somewhat understandably. After you understand these simple facts and put them into practice, the game's combat is easily on a par with other SRPGs, the small maps and lack of environmental effects excepted. e: The implication that there is only one strategy to accomplish this goal is bogus, however. The game itself will demonstrate this relatively shortly. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 26, 2014 |
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Apr 26, 2014 00:36
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I didn't really have any problems with random character deaths at all, aside from one dude who has about as much luck as Shaggy from Scooby Doo and is roughly as important. Literally every other big character death people complained about, I felt like there was AMPLE warning that bad poo poo was going down.
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Apr 27, 2014 23:11
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ProfessorProf posted:As far as I'm aware, you can't get anyone killed in that scene, but I could be wrong. You could not be more wrong. Almost any path except the one you took will result in Egil jumping in to save Alette and getting his skull crushed for his trouble. As in, I replayed this part about 4 times because I was suspicious it was impossible NOT to get anyone killed here. For the record, Egil is the guy I was referring to earlier who has terrible luck. There is actually an achievement for him surviving the game, because there are LOTS of events which will kill him. However, this really doesn't matter because Egil sucks quite a bit and is completely obsoleted by a few characters you meet later in this chapter.
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Apr 29, 2014 00:28
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Also, I feel like I should mention that hero deployment is not at all a 'moot point' if you have fewer than 6 heroes. It didn't matter much here since you had roughly equal numbers to the dredge and it's the first couple of battles, but shoehorning someone who doesn't fit into a particular engagement is a great way to get one of your core group hurt, especially if he gives you a numerical advantage. Turn advantage is a big deal in the most ideal of times - bringing someone who isn't useful into the fray is conceding the turn advantage for no benefit. I've frequently run with only 4 soldiers against 6 dredge playing on hard, just to make sure that I wouldn't get my best characters' poo poo pushed in. That said, the Impale/Battering Ram tactic was brilliantly funny and a classic. Spot on, there.
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Apr 29, 2014 03:29
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Chewbot posted:And believe it or not, Egil is one of the best combat characters in the entire game, in my opinion.  My largest problem with him - and Raidmasters as a whole, really - is that their special ability is hard to synergize with others. Ideally, your team should have its skills in a reasonable order so you can create more options. Impale/Battering Ram is a good synergy, but there are others. Of the skills we've seen so far, Battering Ram and Tempest also synergize pretty well since you can bash someone into position to get styled on by a Warhawk. Raidmasters can harden up and absorb damage if the enemy decides to attack them, but that's if the enemy decides to attack them. If Malice allowed you to choose a target for the taunted target that would be a great synergy, but it doesn't work like that. I personally never felt that Egil getting put on the chopping block was arbitrary here. I picked up on the crush right away and found it completely unsurprising when he got smacked down for it. However, I think the specific way it unfolds is one of those things that makes a lot of sense after you've played a bit longer and you've gotten to know Rook a little better. At this point in time you've heard Iver call him Huntsman once, and the tutorial battle made him look pretty flexible. After you get to know Rook a little more, you realize that while yes, he's balanced, he's best with his bow. My initial response here was to attack the dredge with my axe out, which is how I had been using Rook (for Mark Prey and sneaking in through allies), and that wasn't the right answer. At this point in time I think the insight required to keep Egil alive was a little beyond what the players could reasonably know. That said, just sending them back also does work, yeah, and that's fairly simple. I imagine it gets pretty hairy without Tryggvi, though. Iver's the only guy who can take a hit, and there are a lot of hits to take. On my Hard mode run I ended up shunting a lot of the damage to Tryggvi, which obviously wouldn't be an option if I hadn't backed the project the year prior. I will say, overall, I got into a LOT of fights with my friends over how fair or unfair a number of the character deaths were. There was one I remember you ending up saying people were being massive whiners about, and when I saw that post I laughed for almost two minutes straight because I'd just finished telling a buddy of mine that he was acting a fool for bitching about it. I definitely never felt like I was being played unfairly, but I'm used to the whimsy and reading comprehension required from King of Dragon Pass, so perhaps I'm skewed. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 07:28
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I don't think you're missing too much. I might be misremembering but I'm pretty sure the only narrative impact he has is what we just saw, and one other short conversation in this leg of Rook's journey that doesn't affect anything. Beyond that he's just a Spearmaster for Rook's party, which is handy under certain circumstances but nothing game-changing - the only time his mechanical input is super important is this battle, since Rook's party is still relatively small and the dredge party is pretty large.
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Apr 29, 2014 07:39
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Iver, Egil, and the Thrasher brothers work really awkwardly together because of Iver's size and the number of soldiers involved in it. Shield walls are freaking great in this game, but they rely on people being able to support eachother, which Iver makes awkward by being so huge and Egil also does a relatively bad job of in the early levels because his armor isn't substantially higher than anyone else's and his ability sucks. Bloody Flail gets utterly amazing in a line, so Thrashers rock the house still. I can see him getting used but it's so painful to get him to grow up I just don't see it happening for a lot of people.
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Apr 29, 2014 17:01
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Yeah, to be explicit, the problem with Iver's size is maneuvering the shield wall, which is a really common need, especially when people start falling over. Presume X is an occupied square and - is an unoccupied one in the following ascii demonstrations, but in a human shield wall: [X][X][X][X] [-][-][-][-] [-][-][-][-] In this line, any of your soldiers can reposition and shift the line down without too much trouble. It's a 4 square thing typically. Now consider this line with a varl in it. [X][X][X][X] [-][X][X][-] [-][-][-][-] It's now impossible to move the line without expending Willpower, which is way better used for, you know, smashing someone's face. A human attempting to get around the varl has 8 spaces to move (4 Willpower presuming you even have that much Exertion), and the varl himself has 5 squares (1 Willpower) absolute minimum to move due to his greater size. Varl are often more trouble than they're worth when dealing with a mostly human force. Humans have a much easier time interfacing with a mostly varl force, though. Social commentary? You decide.
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Apr 29, 2014 22:16
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Oddleif is the best, both narratively and mechanically. Also, to answer your question, that's just the AI being weird. It does some inexplicable things on Hard, too. TravelLog posted:Also, for those that have tried Hard and Very Hard, how different are those modes from Normal?
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May 2, 2014 00:52
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ViggyNash posted:How far away is Frostvellr? If its only a few days, then relax. But if it's longer, and we could end up running short on supplies, then keep a steady pace. Supplies are ALWAYS going to be a problem for Rook. The other party is a royal tax collecting delegation with more varl in one place than you see anywhere outside of their homelands. Rook's party is a pack of ragged refugees whose only goal is to not be butchered wholesale.
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May 2, 2014 03:32
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Kopijeger posted:Trivia: names ending with -leif are exclusively masculine, at least in the real world. A female character could be called Oddlaug, Oddbjórg or Oddfrid. wiegieman posted:As someone who hasn't played the game, it doesn't seems spoilery to point out the differences between a veteran military unit and a bunch of villagers who just had to abandon their winter stores. bewilderment posted:Egil's ability isn't bad like some people are saying, it's super awesome because it turns him into supertank. You can shove him towards three weak enemies and Stonewall, and he'll tie them up while you deal with other threats. Stone Wall really shines when you have Egil stuck in among a bunch of big guys like the Scourge we saw earlier, and your positioning is such that most of them can only attack Egil. Then they will stop attempting to maneuver through the pile-up to attack Egil. But this is very, VERY situational and nowhere near as useful as, say, Impale.
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May 2, 2014 14:56
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There ARE items that you can equip to help people draw aggro, but the reality of the situation is that if you're relying on items for your basic dynamics you're already fighting a losing game.
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May 3, 2014 00:03
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During Egil's conversation, you have a few portraits that are instead Eirik.
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May 4, 2014 23:35
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quote:I'm unclear on how Puncture works, math-wise quote:The Thrasher active ability, Bloody Flail, hits four times in a row, each hit doing either 1 point of Strength damage or one point of Armor damage at random (I think the last hit is always Strength, but I might be wrong). The fourth attack does +1 damage for each ally adjacent to the attacker, which in this case was none. Incidentally, it's not a bad idea to kill off an enemy if you can instagib them from full health like you noted you could there. You concede a bit of a turn advantage, but your alternative is leaving a perfectly functional unit on the board, which is Bad, as you found out. Archers in particular are a colossal pain in the rear end, since they synergize with pretty much any melee unit just by their nature. It can bite you in the rear end if there's a real titan of an enemy unit with like 20+ strength or something, but there isn't here (IIRC that blond Veteran Thrasher is the strongest at 11 str). Truly powerful units are pretty darned rare, at any rate. It's also worth noting that killing people off before everyone's engaged and tripping over eachother also whittles back how useful the turn advantage is, since you can see in advance how many times someone is going to move, plan for their moves accordingly, and prepare for gang-up maneuvers like you saw on Iver. This is the reason that going into battle while seriously outnumbered is generally a losing proposition - unless you can divide and conquer, you'll get too much pressure on your critical soldiers and be unable to overcome the sheer amount of armor and strength you need to get rid of before you go down. Toward that end, splitting your forces like that is rarely a good idea. Two-front battles work really awkwardly in Banner Saga due to the realities of the turn system. The biggest use it has is one powerful character getting access to squishies to force Sophie's Choices on your enemy's positioning. In this case that probably would've meant positioning Rook alone near the enemy archers and having him harass them to death. This is also the sort of role that spearmasters shine at. I am also kind of surprised that you got as few enemies as you did. I am used to there being one more of every enemy type involved here, for a total of 7-8 enemies. I'm tempted to dig up a save near there and see if your dialog choices had anything to do with that. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 07:45 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 07:12
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Yeah, the thing that makes Hogun and Mogun so incredible is that not only do they have one of the most useful offensive moves in the game, they also have shields that buff anyone around them. Combine that with their okay Armor potentials and they're also really hard to put down. Oh, and their ability gets more powerful with the more people they're buffing, and getting buffed by. I can't possibly see any synergies here at all. I personally don't focus too much on surrounding enemies unless they're obviously dangerous, but I love Bloody Flail because it's pretty much guaranteed to knock down the threat level of an enemy a notch. It will take a dangerous enemy and make them marginal, or a marginal enemy and make them useless. Contrast this to Egil, who requires like 3 levels to be super useful, and can frequently pop his ability with nothing at all useful coming of it (see last battle).
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May 6, 2014 22:46
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Their higher strength means they tend to be injured for longer, too.
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May 8, 2014 04:04
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quote:Namejis' Ring: This ring was once worn by one of the great kings of men to symbolize the unification of his people. 2 Strength deflected (?), +1 Will per kill. It isn't worth 25 renown, especially with it requiring level 5, which you probably won't see for another few chapters.
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May 9, 2014 01:13
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The floating damage readout was green? I'm not familiar with anything that can do that right off. Precisely what dredge was this? Not a grunt or something, I take it?
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May 12, 2014 18:39
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You burned a varl, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?!
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May 12, 2014 19:24
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The strange point is that he says the floating damage readout was green. As in, his unit took damage, and instead of red (for strength) or blue (for armor) it was green. I know of no skill that can do that in the game. Puncture doesn't make sense because the green color there only shows up on the person ordering the attack, which clearly wasn't him.
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May 13, 2014 06:30
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ProfessorProf posted:I'm looking at a most likely list of Mogun,
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May 13, 2014 15:39
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Yeah, I really liked this choice. It took me a good...3 or 4 playthroughs to get an idea of what it does, but a theory dawned on me I took a moment to really appreciate what was happening here.
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May 14, 2014 06:50
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Ysra is also fantastic for the same reason Impale and Battering Ram was; aim it right, and it will instantly take someone from fit for fight to borderline, and borderline to useless.
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May 16, 2014 01:39
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If you send a squad, you kill the dredge and get a little renown, but it will cost you some lives. If you say 'we'll handle it ourselves', you get into a real cluster of a fight with literally a dozen Dredge Grunts that gives you a real leg up on level qualifications. You will also get maximum renown, but with level promotions coming up from all the murder, chances are it'll go right back out the door again.
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May 16, 2014 06:41
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The supplies you can get from the merchants aren't poisoned so much as they are spoiled. They're fish that someone didn't dry/cure properly. It's kind of a reality check of accepting food blindly...realistically that sort of thing would happen a lot, and it would be the caravan quartermaster's job to make sure he kept on top of it. But the closest thing to a quartermaster you have is Mogr, who is busy with a hundred other things. e: The other cool thing about Ysra is that since her Strength sucks so bad, if she gets wounded she'll only be out for a day or two, even on Hard. And since her primary output is Slag & Burn, she can fight while wounded like it's not even a thing. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 01:34 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 01:32
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FairGame posted:I get the feeling that Warhawks are probably best used with one of those items we saw early on, though, where you recover armor on rest. If you're not using Tempest, just rest 'em that turn. Fortunately, this isn't as hard as you might think. You can actually have Gunnulf at level 3 before you even leave Strand if you feed him enough kills during the mead hall fight (not hard, with those enemies' low strength and Gunnulf's Tempest). Maxing out his armor before you even leave the first chapter helps him like you wouldn't believe. Even just spending one level on armor and the other on Exertion and Strength makes him a goddamn monster. Also a fun note: These war battles are quite random! It's entirely possible to come up with completely different enemy dispositions and makeups here if you reload enough. I always liked that, it keeps the game from being dismantled by singular case logic, since, as we discussed a while back, the AI is deterministic.
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May 20, 2014 15:48
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ProfessorProf posted:To be fair, and this is especially true now that more complicated abilities are in play: The AI is deterministic, but the gameplay is not. Slag & Burn does not always take the middle tile, though it does seem more likely than otherwise, I agree. Moving across it will rarely happen such that someone takes 1 damage instead of 2, or 1 damage instead of 3-4 in the case of a giant. You're not wrong with some of these (dodging chances are actually a static seed and are fully predictable, at least with the statically populated battles), but in practice almost all of it rarely comes into play. Bloody Flail is the only one that can really change the features of a fight's progression, presuming identical orders, and that would require something like a full Strength damage output, which is 6.25% likely. The static battles of this game are actually so reliable that I briefly considered making AutoHotKey scripts for many of them just to show off. I think at one point or another someone on the team realized this, because a lot of the later 'static' fights are actually nothing of the sort.
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May 20, 2014 16:06
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Armor Break is also really good on her since she can get 3 Exertion and 3 Armor Break. Knocking off 6 Armor in one move is incredibly good. It's hard on her Willpower, though, so it isn't right for some peoples' style, but if there's a Stoneguard or something that needs to go, Ysra is exactly the person to tee it up for a bruiser.
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May 20, 2014 17:18
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Also fun to note: If someone's standing at the center of the cross of S&B, it'll do 2 strength damage immediately, and then slap on another 1 armor damage. Because, you know, gently caress that guy.
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May 20, 2014 21:36
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Omobono posted:It's even better than this. S&B is also an armor breaking attack against the middle square, so it won't do 1 armor, it'll do Yrsa's break. If you pump her break to 3, her speciall will then trigger splinter off dredges, because S&B wasn't already good enough. Haha oh man, you're right, I completely forgot about that. So instead of gently caress that guy, it's more 'gently caress all those guys'.
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May 20, 2014 22:48
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Yeah losing Eirik was something that definitely could have been avoided here. He is neither strong nor tough, so it's important to keep him out of harm's way unless he is insulated from reprisal. His active could have also saved Ludin from running out of willpower and dying from lack of resources at the end. The tradeoff would've been more heat on the varl, though, which might have costed Hakon an injury. Bersi and Mogr could have gutted the damage that flew around, though, so probably could've pulled it out. That second wave was not as bad as I'd feared it would be. Only one stoneguard isn't that big of a deal, the issue is when the drat game decides to toss two Scourges at you, because why not. Ysra was probably going to go down with how aggressively she was being used, but it's Ysra. She'll be healthy again in a day, and even if she isn't why the hell do you care, she's just going to be slagging everything. The coals remaining is not a bug by the skill description, though - it says they remain until her next turn. If she never gets one, welp, them's the breaks, kid, we told you what was up. There are a ton of skills that function like this, including one that, hilariously, involves someone setting bombs that never go off.
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May 23, 2014 17:41
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Ahaha, I knew the second the reinforcements popped in with 2 dudes that this was gonna be trouble. Getting an elite slag giant at this point in the game sucks a fatty, and you quite arguably got the worst elite you could have. Nicely handled, though.
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May 24, 2014 18:15
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The numbers are just an expression of how hard the RNG is gonna be on you when you decide to fight, and how. If you fight conservatively when you outnumber the enemy you can end up fighting only like 3 Grunts or something.
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May 25, 2014 04:19
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 WORLDHOOK  I'm surprised you picked up the Dragon Stone but not the Worldhook. The Worldhook is +2 armor break, it is basically a transferable level-up and it is INSANE on Ysra! 5 natural Break, with the potential for up to 3 more from Exertion? Please and thank you, 10 renown at the first window. The padded undercoat is also surprisingly good for something so cheap, it's +1 armor for 5 renown, which you can't get a better deal on except at someone's first levelup. But that said, it becomes obsolete almost instantly when you get to the point where you have 7 items, since +1 armor just isn't as good as a lot of the level 3-4 things you can get. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 19:49
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I remember shortly after this game came out, people were giving the game a TON of flak for being able to lose Gunnulf here. I think the complaining went on for over a full page. I didn't lose Gunnulf and thought it was super clear what you had to do, and as I was typing out a post to that effect, Chewbot posted and basically said "you guys didn't listen to the man." I felt pretty vindicated by that. Anyway, slingers are hilarious because they perform the battering ram portion of impale + battering ram for you. Ludin basically eats those guys for breakfast at any strength level, because he'll do 1 damage on impale, and then laugh his rear end off as the slinger proceeds to use Back Off and rack up another 4 damage all on his own.
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May 30, 2014 03:50
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Yeah, there is one situation later where I will take exception to how stuff works out, but this isn't it. Besides, I always felt like you could have your cake too with the 'leave some varl to gather it up' option. You 'lose' a dozen varl, but the route behind you is probably pretty clear, and the dredge waves are way more interested in your army anyway. Sure, the money cart such as it is doesn't show up at Grofheim, but you take care of business and give a dozen varl a pretty happy ending of hauling tons of money to a city and hanging out at the mead halls until this whole thing blows over.
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May 30, 2014 19:26
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+Drawing Aggro DOES work, but it basically makes them a +x lower strength/more attractive target. So you need +3 or so before you really notice it, and at that point there's a substantial opportunity cost to consider.
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May 30, 2014 20:06
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Xander77 posted:Huh. Is that how you respond every time someone criticizes your game? Because that's perfectly reasonable. You are a good dude most times but this time your head is so far up your rear end I'm wondering if you're inspecting what you had for dinner. Not only did he not respond like that the first time someone criticized it more evenly in this thread, literally less than 10 posts above yours, there were a couple other posts pointing out that there were lots of other points of friction on this decision, which were handled just fine. Both on SA and in the 'popular media'. So no, that isn't how he responds every time someone criticizes the game, as demonstrated in the middle of everything. That doesn't mean he has to deal with people acting like dickheads. You acted like a cock, and when you got called out on being a cock, you turn it into an edgy grimdark thing, and a misogyny thing? So, is me calling you a dick a misandry thing? Am I a self-hating man, now? Get over yourself. Also, I love that you just told the writer of a game what his writing should be. The treasure cart might've been what got these people out here, but like a lot of characters won't shut up about, there's a genocide on the horizon. Yeah, priorities might have shifted a bit. I further pointed out that you could even still address this particular MacGuffin by leaving some varl behind to clean the mess up. Get over yourself. You also picked and chose the most negative interpretation of the concept of 'there is no strictly optimal path' - which is a theme that occurs a good handful of times in this game - and turned it into poo poo that was never said. Manufacturing bullshit is not impressive. Get over yourself. In summation, get the gently caress over yourself.
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May 31, 2014 06:59
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