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KickStarter Telepath Tactics Liberated - deterministic tactical RPG inspired by Fire Emblem

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
Update: Still enjoying the crap out of this game; though it has one issue that gets on my nerves:

It seems to slow down after I've killed a lot of enemies. It's not too bad, but it does annoy me. Hopefully in time this issue will be remedied. If not, I can deal with it, but still it would be nice for the game to run smoothly for the whole battle.
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
I haven't played any of these tactical JRPGs, but I think seeing 50 units on the screen playing animations at the same time would not only look absurd and tacky but be distracting as well. It also makes little sense to have characters play "idle" animations while in the midst of combat, unless it's something like a menacing gesture with a knife or so.
Yeah, the animation in those games usually only plays for the selected unit. And it does look good.
 

Jabber

Educated
Joined
Sep 14, 2015
Messages
43
So I'm not saying change it, but yikes is Tremelo a badass.

More generally, from a balance perspective, there should probably be some limit on per turn usage of inventory + currently "unlimited" skills. Like anyone that has an unlimited movement skill (Shadow Heart, Bronze Golem, Tremelo) has infinite movement if they have enough pills. It's not totally broken, because they can still only attack once and pills/apples aren't free, but it is still pretty aggressive.

Seems like one option would be one free inventory action (use, give, equip) plus one more in exchange for ending your turn. And maybe "unlimited" movement skills get limited to three or something, which is still functionally a lot, but not actually infinite...
 

Cnaiur

Augur
Joined
Aug 25, 2014
Messages
184
This is one fine game.

Second mission was hard as balls, but the 4 missions that follow are much easier. Maybe I did something wrong ;)
 

Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
there should probably be some limit on per turn usage of inventory + currently "unlimited" skills

Yeah. The next time I make a game with this engine, I'll be making a few tweaks. Limiting item usage a bit and adding an "awareness" stat that lets a character turn to face the first X backstabs in a turn will probably be in the offing.
 

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
This is one fine game.

Second mission was hard as balls, but the 4 missions that follow are much easier. Maybe I did something wrong ;)
I found the second mission pretty easy, but then again I didn't bother to get the treasure chests.
 

Cnaiur

Augur
Joined
Aug 25, 2014
Messages
184
Maybe I'm counting wrong, I meant the mission where you:

have to rescue the shadowling from the central prison and where an entire army gets triggered after x amount of turns
 

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
Maybe I'm counting wrong, I meant the mission where you:

have to rescue the shadowling from the central prison and where an entire army gets triggered after x amount of turns
That's an extra mission and if you are doing it that would be the fourth mission. 1st: Fight the two bandits at your camp. 2nd: Defend the town from brigands. 3rd: Save the merchant caravan. Then IF you saved the crossbow woman you go on to save Meridian.
 

Cnaiur

Augur
Joined
Aug 25, 2014
Messages
184
You're right. It's the fourth mission. Took me 3 times to complete it, got locked in by all the emerging troops - until I realized that I had to be way more aggressive in order to save time.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
You're right. It's the fourth mission. Took me 3 times to complete it, got locked in by all the emerging troops - until I realized that I had to be way more aggressive in order to save time.

Same here, took me a while to figure out that the reinforcements get triggered if you take too long, not if you get too close or something. I succeeded when I aggressively advanced, took out all the guards, opened the prison gate and had one of the two sisters take the imprisoned gargoyle thing (because they have speed buff and taking him slows you down). Then just hightail it out of there while defending against the axe guys coming in from the north. Hardest mission so far, I'd say.
 

roshan

Arcane
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
2,426
Any advice for the bridge mission? I keep getting someone killed. Last last time I tried, I actually managed to kill almost all the enemies before a mentalist unexpectedly killed Harynx.
 

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
Any advice for the bridge mission? I keep getting someone killed. Last last time I tried, I actually managed to kill almost all the enemies before a mentalist unexpectedly killed Harynx.
Turtle. You don't need to be aggressive in that map.
 

roshan

Arcane
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
2,426
Turtle. You don't need to be aggressive in that map.

I just got this map. Yeah, I mostly had my frontliners in a line, returning attacks, preventing the back line from taking damage, and avoiding backstabs. I felt this mission was a bit "random" though compared to others, because how combat plays out depends mostly on the order in which enemy units end up crossing the chokepoints in the bridge.
 

Zetor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
1,706
Location
Budapest, Hungary
For the bridge map specifically,
There's a turtle spot tailor-made for you in the middle of the bridge. Two barricades, a hole in the bridge (you can push enemies in there, or pull them in with the grapple chain) and plenty of space to set up your kill-zones on both sides. As long as you're killing or disabling enemies faster than they spawn, you should never get overwhelmed.... and if you're setting up the chokepoint right, you should be pushing at least 1-2 enemies into the water per turn, which is as good as killing them. The only dicey part is when the spriggats show up, since they love surrounding any overextending units... but even 3 of them combined with an enemy crossbowman couldn't kill Madeleine in a single turn (and she's pretty squishy).

If you need a walkthrough-ish approach, this is how I did it: http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...lay-telepath-tactics.9337/page-2#post-1245252
As a general note, you should kill enemy casters first in pretty much every situation (cryo > photo > mentalist > skia > pyro... psy healers are only a problem if you're trying to kill enemies by attrition instead of focus fire, which is rare), and never let your fliers get in range of potential Gravity Spike casts -- just have them hang waaay back from the frontline until enemy mentalists are dead.
 
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Jabber

Educated
Joined
Sep 14, 2015
Messages
43
Well I finished an ironman run. I'll give a few comments for the (possible) benefit of Craig and because I very much enjoyed the game and feel like doing a write up on the run. Spoilers abound obviously, although I'll keep it to character spoilers (i.e. no battle / plot spoilers outside of the spoiler tags).

From a stability perspective, I didn't play earlier buggier versions, which sound like had a lot of issues, and therefore had a reasonably bug free run. I had a few inventory issues where one member got the same inventory as another, overwriting their own inventory. I fixed this by editing the save file, but it wasn't great. I also had one crash when I shoved someone into a wall on the Coria Dogs upstairs map. The biggest issue by far was the poor performance on larger maps, even on my generally quite speedy gaming laptop.

Playing blind, it took somewhere around 4 runs to finish.
2 runs failed very early (one was inside the bandit fortI recall, can't remember the other one). A third run failed on the Coria Dogs basement map, but Tremolo had earlier been crushed by the bridge on the bandit fort map and the party was generally poorly optimized.

I think the game was reasonably fair to blind play (no Wiegraf level nonsense) but occassionally had poor gameplay when it would cheesily Shanghai the player:

Emma doesn't get to check equipment before going to the bandit fort, and can easily be underequipped. This is dumb.
When fleeing the bandit fort, the game does not warn the player about the drawbridge with enough time for the player do actually move their units. This appears to be an oversight, but is material.
On the big bridge map, the player does not have any time to deal with the explosives before they are set off.
Spearman revenge fight in the mines; the player is not given a chance to equip and can be underequiped.

Anyhow, my core force tended to be the two sisters, tremolo, the shadow heart, mentalist, cryo mage, bronze golem and light mage. I picked others to taste but they didn't really matter. I didn't lose any characters on the winning run, although had two dicey moments with Meridian and one with Emma.

Overall the game was decently challenging early on but stopped being challenging somewhere around the big bridge fight (which was a great map - god fuck those mentalists). The game is more fun when it is challenging. Maps where the player wasn't under any time pressure and wasn't on defense tended to be the least challenging because enemies would basically wait around for you to swing by and kill them. This issue afflicted later maps much more than earlier maps.

Overall I thought the game was good (very good for the size of the development team) although could use some balance work around XP (I didn't grind, but nothing prevents the player from abusing non-combat sources of XP) and inventory usage (no limit to consumable use per turn doesn't make any sense). I thought early maps with smaller parties were more fun because they had specific challenges to overcome. Later maps felt more like a slog of units that couldn't really hurt you but would wait around until you could come over to kill them. I also felt like the early game had fun optional challenges but the mid and late game didn't; chests stopped being an optional challenge because they became so easy to get. AI wasn't great, but good AI is extremely hard and I thought it was competent given available resources.

A lot of those comments were criticisms but overall I did really enjoy the game. The core combat engine and abilities are excellent.

That all said, I'll close with some comments on specific characters:

1) Tremolo the Assassin. Tremolo is unbelievably OP. Like head and shoulders towering over the other characters. He starts out as a balanced character, with good damage output and mobility but no armour and only a bit of dodge to try to protect himself. He finishes (i.e. once he hits level 1 whisper) as a nigh-invulnerable god-among-men with infinite movement points and the ability to oneshot I think almost every unit in the game, and I think also all the bosses. To break that down, he is (mostly) invulnerable because his dodge will be over 100% with shining, and enemies do not have accuracy over 100%. Some abilities can still hit him, but they are rare and frequently he can alpha strike anyone that has an always-hit ability, or at the very least he can easily avoid them because he is so mobile. He also is the only unit immune to backstabs (with his ability), but mostly doesn't care outside the early game because thereafter he generally can't be hit to be backstabbed in the first place. He has infinite movement points because he can leap an infinite number of times, as long as he has blue pills. Even without leap, he has 9 base movement points, 10 with running shoes, and 14 while sprinting with running shoes. He can also fly if you give him the hover box item. Finally, on damage, he has a lot of strength and does something like 4x damage on a megastab backstab. On an enemy without resistances he can easily do over 100 damage, which is vastly higher than any other character that at least I had. He can end the final map in the first handful of turns, once the boss leaves himself vulnerable to a backstab (I didn't do this, but the capability was there). He can also bail you out by moving 25+ hexes to kill a unit you realize can get a kill shot off on the next turn after you screwed up a move or an attack. Truely a god among men.

2) Emma + Sabrina. Overall good, particularly early on, although it felt like Emma had much better stats than Sabrina and her motivation skills are pretty clearly superior to the trap skills Sabrina has. Easy to get 100% physical damage resistance with frost armour, which makes them quite effective as tanks (at least if there aren't mages nearby). Risk of getting shoved or thrown can be scary though.

3) Harynx the Shadow. Excellent healer; tanky, and mobile. Also healers get a lot of experience and so are easy to level up.

4) Louise the Mentalist. Useful as a healer throughout the game (I tended to find I needed at least two, particularly once army sizes grew) and her mental abilities are quite powerful. Shoving people into water / lava / chasms is brutally effective, and the gravity spike abilities absolutely ruin air units. Mind control didn't seem to work - maybe a bug or I just didn't understand how to use it.

4) Phoebe the Cryo Mage. Probably the #2 best unit. High damage output, plus has the critical frost armour ability that gives an unreasonably high +50% physical damage resistance, easily pushing any armour user into effective immunity to non-magical damage. I had fun giving her the power orb and letting her go to work, but the key spell is really frost armour.

5) Lord Darakai the Bronze Golem. OK but not great. Very high hp makes for a seemingly good tank, but he is kind of overshadowed in that role by armour users that can get 100% physical damage resistance. He does good damage and can hit multiple units, but doesn't do great damage. At least he doesn't need equipment. He gets a free heal once per turn in exchange for 2 energy points, which makes him a better mage tank, but that isn't really ever a critical issue. He also has an unlimited use ability that gives him +1 speed. Like Tremolo, this allows him unlimited movement points if he has enough blue pills. I never needed to abuse it, but I suppose it was nice to know that it was there. His lack of a massive damage output ability plus his lack of base armour compared to an armour wearer tended to hurt his utility a key character.

6) Farasat the Light Mage. Decent mage, his only critical purpose though is to cast Blinding Cloak on Tremolo to give him shining.

7) Rebecca the Fire Mage. Best mage damage dealer, but doesn't have a critical buff or healing ability so less important than the others.

8) Silithis the Lizard Dude. Strong, mobile, high hp. Not much else to say.

9) Meridian the Black Spriggat. I badly wanted her to be good, because she seems so cool when everyone is human and you go out of your way to rescue her in what is presented as an optional rescue. Unfortunately, extreme frailty + relatively low damage made her at best OK. Sometimes you can sneak in a good shadow breath but she is very easy to get killed and I almost lost her at least once due to forgetting about bowman counterfire. Fortunately Tremolo sorted the situation out...

10) Everyone else. Generally outshined by 1-8 above. Scarlet (Cavalier) gets an honorable mention for early game utility with good health, good damage and high mobility (plus not ending the turn after attack). She winds up being underpowered and just unable to compete effectively for critical slots. Gavrielle (Bowman) doesn't do enough damage and is too frail to be overly useful. Her massive range is interesting but she doesn't do enough damage to matter, in particular because Tremolo can just bulldoze over whatever you otherwise might not want to get into range with. None of the characters feels actively bad, just not good enough to compete for limited slots with the critical tanks, healers and mages.

---
 
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Zetor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
1,706
Location
Budapest, Hungary
Mind Control is an RNG-within-the-RNG ability, ie. even if it appears to have a '100%' chance to hit, the actual chance of the MC working is only 70%. Still quite useful in some situations.

Definitely agree that difficulty does plateau early on somewhat, but later bosses can still be extremely deadly. In general I like that most battlemaps aren't the typical SRPG fare "start from a difficult situation, defuse it, then commence 20 turns of boring mop-up with zero chance of losing" with reinforcements and bosses usually being extremely powerful units that can murder squishies in a single hit if the player is careless. In my first (blind) playthrough I started to lose units after landing on the final island, and it was a tactical error every time (it's easy to underestimate how much damage a single enemy spearman can do with Impale if they attack from behind... or how much damage a 'backstab' Mind Blast can do to someone with zero mental resist).

I think the game is more interesting if you don't over-use assassins as attack units (there's a recruitable assassin in the game who's even more powerful than Tremolo, btw!). In my second playthrough I just used assassins as highly mobile 'utility' players, ie. break open chests, get behind enemy lines to draw fire, push buttons, etc. They used to be even more brokenly powerful, if you can believe that (Tremolo could one-shot a mid-late game boss through his plate armor using an iron knife, without having to use Mega Stab).

Wrt casters, there is definitely a pecking order. Freeze is completely OP... it lasts way too long, and there is only one counter-move (which requires a fire caster). Blind is also very strong (turns reliable attacks into coin tosses), but at least the unit isn't going to be completely helpless and can use a consumable to heal themselves. Soften/slow from shadow spells is strong in theory, but not that much in practice, since killing or disabling enemies > debuffing enemies, with very few exceptions. Poison and burning are weak in general -- attrition tactics aren't very useful with the massive alpha strike damage throughput you can do in a turn, not to mention the amount of healing done by psy healers (usually AOE). BTW, Meridian is actually a caster (check her psy power!) even though she starts as a melee flier unit... the real power is in the breath attack, but the short range and weak effects makes it really situational. If only she was a frost spriggat, she'd probably be the #1 unit in the entire game!

Finally, a note about the AI -- it is quite vicious in that it tries to kill weakened / vulnerable units as much as possible (I suspect having 100% hit rate helps with this), but this also makes it very predictable and easy to bait. If you put some heavy armor on Sabrina, she can become a one-woman frontline by placing multiple traps each turn and using the 'right' positioning...
 
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Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
Well, I just beat the game. Took longer than I thought due to RL issues distracting me. Anyway, the game is great (though not perfect) and I really enjoyed it.

The biggest issue by far is the drop in performance. As for difficulty; I found it reasonably challenging though I only lost a companion and had to restart once. I should note though that I'm fairly competent at srpg's so for others this game could seem pretty difficult. I never used Tremolo (didn't like him or his face) so I never got to see how OP he is. I consider that a plus (I wouldn't use him for a second play through either).

Any way, I have to concur with Jabber that some of the later maps make turtling too effective; until you get to the mines which add the infinite reinforcements issues. I found the final battle against the Ebon Riders a tad dissapointing because of this. Not that I didn't still enjoy the battle.

Overall: 9/10 (would be 10/10, but I can't ignore the performance issues.) Will play again. Best srpg I've played since Path of Radiance.
 

Mustawd

Guest
You're right. It's the fourth mission. Took me 3 times to complete it, got locked in by all the emerging troops - until I realized that I had to be way more aggressive in order to save time.

I had the same issue with this mission

Any advice for the bridge mission? I keep getting someone killed. Last last time I tried, I actually managed to kill almost all the enemies before a mentalist unexpectedly killed Harynx.

I gave Sabrina the helicopter and equipped her with a ton of stuff. The just flew her on the left side of the bridge, killed the stragglers, and made it to the exit while the rest turtled on the bridge. You can call it non-RP win, but I didn't restart after some of my chars' permadeath, so I was at a disadvantage anyhow. So I consider it fair game.
 
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Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
Thanks for the posts, guys--it's really heartening for me to hear how much you all liked it. :)

Since we're talking about that, I'd just like to take this opportunity to quickly reiterate the importance of leaving positive reviews on Steam--the more positive reviews the game has, the more visible it becomes in search results, which means more people learn about the game, which means more sales, which means (drum roll...) that I can afford to make follow-ups that build on the good stuff and address the shortcomings.
 

Jabber

Educated
Joined
Sep 14, 2015
Messages
43
Zetor:

Where is the other assassin? Was it
the named assassin in the Coria Dogs basement fight? I couldn't talk with her and just wound up killing her. I can't really remember other named assassins in the game but maybe I just wasn't paying attention and killed them. Or possibly the game was misleading on talking being the only path to enemy recruitment.

Re: freeze, completely agree - I forgot to mention that but it is another good reason why Phoebe is the best mage. I think freeze might be the best secondary effect if it lasted one turn, much less the many turns that it does. I also agree re: Meridian; I eventually realized she was really a mobile caster mid to late through the run but she still doesn't really compete effectively in that role. Just not enough utility vs. light or cold mages and not enough damage vs. fire mage. A frost spriggat would be significantly more effective and might edge out Rebecca. Also I think in hindsight a good candidate for a blood orb, which I think they can use and might have made her more effective. Despite Meridian's weakness, I still frequently used her, just never found her to actually be that useful. Her breath hit pattern is actually also pretty terrible because it means she can't shoot through allies, which exposes her to more potential damage (or requires someone to move in front of her after firing, which isn't always possible). It also opens her to more counter-bow fire, which is very dangerous to her. Anyhow...

Agreed on AI points. Fair point on Sabrina, and I did occasionally use her traps for that purpose but I'd still personally take Emma's better stats + AoE motivation.
 

roshan

Arcane
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
2,426
So the party I'm running with right now (at the Coria dogs fight):

1. Emma + Sabrina, of course.
2. The Fire Mage - great damage - but based on posts here, I might be better off replacing her with the cryo mage instead?
3. The spearman - pretty awesome. Returns attacks done two squares away, the impale ability is pretty useful, can attack from behind others and is a great tank.
4. The cavalier - can do a "sortie" where she heads out and backstabs, then gets back into formation. Can go long distances. But her charge ability seems useless.....
5. The bowman - turning out to be pretty awesome so far. I haven't made use of the long range bow yet. But his triple shot ability rules! Also that air shot one that goes long range, it means he is always doing something useful regardless of positioning.
6. Lakshmi Bana - was nice and useful at first, but she is really being far outshined by the bowman who has racked up cool special abilities. So she is relegated to being a generic ranged attacker.
8. The Shadowling - great as a highly mobile healer.

Any recommendations for characters I should switch out at this point? I have everyone except Dakarai alive (didn't find it worth keeping him due to the crap base mobility). How much of the game have I completed?
 

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
"2. The Fire Mage - great damage - but based on posts here, I might be better off replacing her with the cryo mage instead?"

No, just use them both. They are both really good, even if one is a bit better than the other.

"6. Lakshmi Bana - was nice and useful at first, but she is really being far outshined by the bowman who has racked up cool special abilities. So she is relegated to being a generic ranged attacker."

Yeah, drop her for the ice user. I used Lakshmi for the whole game and really regret it.

"Any recommendations for characters I should switch out at this point? I have everyone except Dakarai alive (didn't find it worth keeping him due to the crap base mobility). How much of the game have I completed?"

Coria dogs, eh? I'd guess you're a little more than halfway through the game.
 

Namutree

Savant
Joined
Jun 3, 2015
Messages
250
Thanks for the posts, guys--it's really heartening for me to hear how much you all liked it. :)

Since we're talking about that, I'd just like to take this opportunity to quickly reiterate the importance of leaving positive reviews on Steam--the more positive reviews the game has, the more visible it becomes in search results, which means more people learn about the game, which means more sales, which means (drum roll...) that I can afford to make follow-ups that build on the good stuff and address the shortcomings.

Was already planning on giving it a positive review, but I like to wait 'till I have a decent amount of time on the game. I don't want to be, "that idiot who reviewed a game he barely understands." At any rate, I suppose I do have enough time on it now so I went ahead and gave it the positive review it deserved. Well done.
 

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