Pathfinder: Kingmaker

I'm still confused about that because game isn't THAT difficult to me.

Like, best I can figure out, people are angry that they can't beat an encounter on first try or without coming back later <_<

That and some folk are complaining that difficulty labeled "Unfair" is literally "Unfair". Which makes me wonder, why DO some people start game on higher than normal difficulty on first time playthrough anyway?

Edited by SpookyMask on Sep 28th 2018 at 10:30:46 PM

Normal difficulty is the one getting most of the complaints, apparently even by PnP people. It reads like somebody put the XCOM RNG into an isometric RPG.

Seems to be all over the place to be honest. It's kind of like fighting trolls in Baldur's Gate with no fire or acid. I just started using console commands at that point, so it never bothered me. I guess games like that just aren't common enough for people to actually prepare a lot for encounters.

Edited by TerminusEst on Sep 28th 2018 at 12:48:57 PM

One of the complaints I see is that apparently some enemies have stats that seem way too much to be attainable at low levels. Apparently it seems like things like inflated AC or enemies that do 2d6+20 damage per hit at level 2 or something I saw people posted about...

Edited by onyhow on Sep 28th 2018 at 5:38:07 AM

and yeah in TT. 1-3 is pretty deadly no matter the D&D edition, but you can still balance encounters in such a way that theres a decent chance of stabilizing people before they bleed out.

Either way, lot of folk seems to be complaining about encounters I didn't have problems with <_<

Like, 30 hours into the game and I'm finally having problems with Branded Trolls: In areas where they show up, they show up in large numbers as if they were just buffed mooks, but to take them down I have to buff EVERY character and pretty much nova them, so they feel more like boss enemies. They have +13 to hit which in these levels in pathfinder pretty much means "They are going to hit you majority of time". I'm actually considering turning down difficulty from custom "normal/1.0" to game's normal setting where party takes 0.8 damage and enemies are "slightly weaker"

But lot of folk are complaining about earlier encounters before Troll Trouble starts so thats why I'm kinda confused where they are getting the complaints from

Edited by SpookyMask on Sep 29th 2018 at 10:51:18 PM

So I just did what I said I was gonna do and turned difficulty from the normal enemy strength and normal damage to game's own normal setting which is "slightly weaker enemies" and "0.8 damage" and suddenly branded trolls stopped one round killing my level 6 party members and become easy enough to defeat without heavily buffing <_<

So uh, I'm back to wondering what people are smoking with "Normal difficulty is too hard" complaints

It might be a question of strategy.

or class makeup.

or familiarity with how to exploit pathfinder's turn system and class makeups.

a lot of people dont micromanage and plan their party strategy intensely and sometimes games like this assume everyone plans to micromanage everything.

One thing that helps is that if you don't level up asap you can buy mercenaries for 500 gold apiece at level one. That's enough for two custom characters once you finish off the first bandit group at olegs. Also if the early game is giving you a bad time, I strongly advise playing a Class that gets summon monster or animal companion as a class feature.

I do understand the problem of the difficulty, the game does not do any sort of explanation of all it's mechanics, leading to deaths in the tutorial when the player rightfully tries to charge the archers and gets sneak attacked to death. The difficulty slider is a bit of a problem, the only difficulty that seems proper is challenging but customizing the Flat Increase of All Enemy Rolls to normal.

Hmm, game seems to have problem with badly explaining mechanics, especially the kingdom mechanics.

I didn't even realize that each major problem has timelimit until game over if it isn't dealt in time. I just dealt with problems as they popped up, but it seems some players instead continue to kingdom build before trying to deal with problems so they are surprisingly hit with game over screen. (still not sure how it works, but I'm under impression that if you turn kingdom mechanics to Auto, it also turns them off?)

Like, if you always focus on questing, you don't have to worry about timelimits and you have plenty of time building your kingdom between major crises, but problem is that game doesn't tell you you actually have a timelimit so you don't know you should stop building the kingdom besides being annoyed by problem events popping up each month. I mean, to me it just seemed common sense "Hmm, this undead giants problem is popping up each month, let's take care of main quest because that is annoying", but not everyone plays that way.

Either way, I do actually have to say I surprisingly like how main quests when it says "Hurry and do something" you should actually do something. It actually feels like time is passing in the game while in Baldur's Gate and Fallout you can essentially adventure for 50 years without really anything happening if you on purpose take everything really slow.

Anyhoo, after like 50 hours(or was it 40, I can't check right now) gotta say that while I do think game is great, it has nasty habit of blind siding you if you haven't stocked up on status effect removal scrolls and/or diamond dust :P

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 2nd 2018 at 9:16:05 PM

Got the game, 12 hours in...still have no idea what class to play lol. Got around a bit with a Vivisectionist Alchemist to level 3...but now planning to restart. I'm nuts lol.

Gotta say though, some of the stuff you can encounter early can be nuts, although thankfully you don't need to engage a lot of them right away. At least it's not the rest ambush, got hit by nasty one while fatigued sucks hard, not to mention that facing 2 two-handed barbarians backed up by archers and such with high to-hit and str bonus to damage due to rage and such sucks. Hard.

Edited by onyhow on Oct 11th 2018 at 4:24:20 AM

Also, having sex in this game only takes a minute, or even less. Who would have thought it would be a quickie...

Got my Vivisectionist Alchemist to act 2...not sure if I still should restart or not (not sure if 17 dex/18 int initial build is good idea or not...is it better to go for Str build or just drop int to 16 and do something else, consider Alchemist don't have much of save spells?) It's still not that late, so...

Edited by onyhow on Oct 15th 2018 at 7:58:34 AM

Well first dlc has been out for this game for a while and lot of patches been released, so figured out this is good time to start a new playthrough since my Kingmaker campaign is still on going so I still can't play further than the chapter with barbarians :'D

How buggy is the game currently?

I'd like to know as well. Can't decide between giving this a run or replaying Battletech.

Well I'm gonna report when I stop trying to replay Inquisition

(its kinda hard to play two rpgs at same time :p)

Okay I still haven't caught up to where I was in first playthrough(that was 70+ hours in) but I do have noticed that they have cleaned most obvious early game bugs at least(and by that I mean "Bugs even I notice since I never looked into combat log too much to see if math was right on my first playthrough") and the bugs related to classes that were obvious as well :P Like this time I got way more bonus spells as level 1 eldritch scoundrel since apparently first time around int didn't give you bonus spells to start with. I would hazardly guess there shouldn't be game breaking bugs anymore, but don't take me on that before act 4 at least since majority of them were in end game as far as I understand.

Edited by SpookyMask on Jan 8th 2019 at 4:51:28 PM

I started playing this slightly before the holidays and been working my way through it slowly. Partly because that's just how I play. I like making my choices and then reloading and seeing what other ways I could have solved a situation. I usually stick with my first instinct, but it's fun to see what could have been.

The second part for that slowly is that damn if the game is slow to play, just because it takes forever to, well, load. It's to the point that I loathe to leave an area, just because it takes me minutes. If I want to walk from my throne room to the tavern in my capital, it takes almost as long as me putting on my shoes in real time and running to the store across the street... That's just not acceptable. Further making traversing painful is the fact that there's no way to speed up your walking either.

The same thing is ruining kingdom management for me too. It takes forever to open the kingdom window and you can only do so on the world map or the throne room, so if I want to see how much BP I got, well, that's two minutes of my life right there.

This is all playing on a decently up to date gaming PC, loading from an SDD.

I've heard that they're doing a complete rebuild of the game to address the issue, which is great, but I can just see that breaking half of the game again. This is a shame, since it seems to be working pretty well now, The level of bugginess right now is just something to be expected from a game this size, all of its main peers have suffered from similar or worse, even when patched.

Yet it's not only that, some of is just that the game doesn't even try to make playing it easier for the player. The aforementioned lack of speeding up walking is one such thing, other is that you can't leave your capital from your throne room, rather you have to walk through the slow loading main square first. Or that kingdom management really didn't need to be this big an complex thing on its own, it could have just been one more tab in the menu where you have your inventory and character sheets.

I do really like the game though. More than Po E 2 and maybe even Tyranny. Really tempted to quit playing for now though and wait for that rebuild though. But then I'd have to wait for them to fix the bugs coming out of that too, so I'll keep playing for now.

Huh, loading times aren't that long for me. I mean, at longest its almost minute, but game used to have much longer time when starting the game before patches for me at least

Oki by now I'm back in Varnhold Vanishing(act 3. I guess 4 if you count Season of Bloom as full act even thought it didn't exist in tabletop version) and I've encountered few more bugs, but they were minor graphical ones only. Haven't encountered any bugs that affected the gameplay or quest completion at least

Edited by SpookyMask on Jan 12th 2019 at 2:18:11 PM

Oh hey, they released the patch 1.2 which main point is to reduce loading times. (it also fixed other bugs, but yeah, I haven't tested it yet but according to forums on beta 1.2 patches, they made game much much faster)

As was expected, the patch also broke a lot of things in the game. It was bound to happen with a rebuild and a game like this. Happily I managed to finish the game just before the patch hit, so I avoided all that even if I had to live with the absurd load times.

Seeing as I really liked most of the game, I'd want to say that the ending was great, but my experience towards the end was mostly filled with annoyance. I even really liked where the story went, but everything else was a massive slog. The whole time as I was playing it felt like the devs paid less and less attention and care the further into the game we went. The early parts were really polished and well made but the few last chapters were pretty bare-boned and focused on the main quest.

Then in the final chapter they just threw the game balance out of the window. I actually liked the level of the end game difficulty spike, so I'm not complaining about that (and there are tools to adjust the difficulty besides), but they coupled that with this repetitive nonsense. When you finally invade the First World, which is this mystical and chaotic place... you fight the same type of an infuriating enemy that needs very specific tactics and counters and you end up doing it the same way again and again for six maps. Then you just get the boss and it's over. It would've been OK to include these enemies if there had been a ton of variety to contrast them, all kinds of wondrous beast and foes of the fey to best, but they'd clearly used all their stuff during the main game and had nothing left.

Still, I really liked the concept and the willingness to try to pull off something this complex from the devs. They're clearly passionate about their game. Thus, in the end, I'm positively inclined towards it. As a narrative experience I enjoyed it more than either of the Po Es. The fey are some of my favourite forces and are usually relegated to minor distractions, side enemies, so it was refreshing to have a game focused on them.

Okay I have completed game too, but on my view it was actually pretty bug free besides end game having some minor stuff.

That said, I do agree that it does seem like they did rush with enemy placement in final act because too many Wild Hunt monsters with stupid paralyzing gaze. I mean it would be fine if they appeared once or twice, but they weren't even in the original AP(they were new monster for bestiary 6) so it kinda stands out as "Huh, they really couldn't figure out any other monsters than ghosts, vilderavns and wild hunts for final act". Heck, they didn't even include Wild Hunt Hounds, just scouts, archers and monarch

That said, story wise it was great and I found epilogue satisfying too. I also loved this game's "Oh hey EVERYONE is here, and I mean everyone including all minor named sidequest characters!" moment :D

Edited by SpookyMask on Jan 29th 2019 at 10:26:31 PM

So both enhanced edition and final dlc(of the initial season pass at least, but probably final overall?) has been released now

Kinda weirded out to realize how much stuff enhanced edition actually added ._. First they add lot of misc weapons to various areas to spread around previously rarer weapons more and then they also added lot of new minor areas, like lot of boggard related ones too.

Anyhoo, still kinda weirded out by choice of adding slayer to the game. Regardless, been trying out the rogue like mode of Tenebrous Depths and uh, I think I should just remember to cast freedom of movement on everybody since only reason I lost latest playthrough was the boss stun locking every party member with stagger :P

I am consistently tempted by this... but reading reviews and looking at the Kingdom mechanics and the timers (And how you have to really Guide Dang It! for a lot of the game) makes me a bit wary.

But I'm hankering for a solid RPG with good companions...