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Underrail [PRE-RELEASE THREAD, GO TO NEW THREAD]

GJIG

Novice
Joined
Jun 13, 2015
Messages
21
The biggest mistake newcomers make is not having enough killing potential, which typically stems from a lackluster commitment to the forms of damage-dealing they are specialized in. This isn't just about having the right skills and feats, it's also about having the right equipment, utilities and items on you. It occasionally means keeping a secondary weapon on you that still benefits from your maxed skills, but deals a different type of damage than your primary weapon, or is just otherwise more effective at killing enemies who are resistant to your primary weapon.

You have to max your main skills. Rest is optional.

Yep, you should commit fully to the general method(s) of dealing damage that you intend to use (e.g. guns, or say... melee and throwing). Typically this means maximizing both the skills themselves and the attribute boosting these skills (e.g. maxing Perception and Guns, or maxing Dexterity, Melee and Throwing) --- but not always. Sometimes more balanced attributes lead to a better commitment to your chosen approach to combat, if your build requires feats with vastly different attribute requirements. I would recommend that anyone who is new to the game should first read through all of the feats, and then use that knowledge to decide how they want to approach combat, and what stats and equipment said approach requires.

Non-combat builds are mostly the same. You still benefit from having as much Stealth as possible, which is one of your main ways of dealing with combat (i.e. not dealing with it). However, it is not as important to minmax compared to builds that need to deal enough damage. You can frequently hit Persuasion checks without fully maxing Persuasion, especially if you have 10 will or more, and are decently leveled. And you don't need 10 Agi or more to have reasonable stealth.
 
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Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
Thanks all. I don't want to spoil myself, so that should be more than enough. I'll just go in with a sort of AOD mentality to point spend.
 

TwinkieGorilla

does a good job.
Patron
Joined
Oct 19, 2007
Messages
5,480
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath
Ok, I finally got this. Although I was really waiting for full release...

I assume I can just choose on a whim and dive in? Anything clearly broken/etc at the present to watch out for?

Be smart with your builds. I find it more enjoyable for replay value to focus on a handful of skills, favor them, and stay true to the kind of character you envisioned. I recently had an experience where I was getting my ass handed to me over and over again because I kept trying to do it in a way that had worked for every other build I'd previously made until I realized "Dude. Handle this situation like your current character would, c'mon!" and the battle was over in a minute. Godspeed and good luck!
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
Read the descriptions of Skills and Attributes and do what seems sensible from there. I'm confident with this information, you can make a very strong character.

Also read description of all feats, because it is possible on start - that's what really helpful to plan your character.
 
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TwinkieGorilla

does a good job.
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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath
Alfons

Early game, in GMS compound, in the commons. Normally I crawl through the vent to the room adjacent to the raiders and their hostages. I then go into sneak mode, open the door, set traps around the door, lob a grenade carefully so as not to hit the hostages, then backtrack away from the door while hugging the western wall so the raiders need to come after me through the door, getting trapped in the process. Then it's a matter of taste after that.

Well this current character has no points in throwing and is almost 90% a Psi character with low strength and constitution and very light armor. I think I simply initialized the battle, used telekinetic punch on the leader, then neural overload, then used the forcefield in the door in such a way that I could get behind it, wait out my turn, then peek around the corner and lay more punch and overload on the raiders unable to get through the door. This is with a character who has the "Force User" feat.
 

Alfons

Prophet
Joined
Jul 25, 2014
Messages
1,031
Force user shenanigans, gotta love those.
I had an encounter with a group of gangsters that went: Pyrokineses, Premaditation, Locust of Control, Bilocation, seal the exit with Force Field, sit back and enjoy the show.
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2014
Messages
17
I think both Classic and Oddity XP system suffer from the amount of meaningless containers spread across the game. In Classic system it's a chore to pick lock on every container, on Oddity system it's a chore to check every single trash can. Both systems would benefit from a slight level redesign where amount of containers would be reduced and a few more interesting container types would be introduced.
 

Atchodas

Augur
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
1,047
No No! Blasphemy !!! Oddity is perfect !!! just ask this bunch of sad motherfucker oddity fanboys :D It is perfect when you kill 5 enemies of same type and get 0 oddities because they are RNG , It is perfect when one enemy type drops 3 oddity and stops giving exp and then there is like 30 more of them to kill , seems yesterday i kicked a nest of some LARPing faggots :D who enjoys skipping stuff like combat and locked rooms etc in games oh well .. some of you should stop getting so butthurt over other people's opinions
 

Fenix

Arcane
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Russia atchoum!
I'm new here, and most likely shouldn't say it here, how I like your mascot pics. That above is hilariuos. )))

I think both Classic and Oddity XP system suffer from the amount of meaningless containers spread across the game. In Classic system it's a chore to pick lock on every container, on Oddity system it's a chore to check every single trash can. Both systems would benefit from a slight level redesign where amount of containers would be reduced and a few more interesting container types would be introduced.

I think the point is - curiosity, thirst for exploration. Btw you don't need to poke your nose in every trash can - game has oddyties in quantities that far exceeding the demands, approximately twice.
 
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Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
Man I'm really enjoying this game, eventhough it's still in beta. It has all the potential to be one of the RPG greats of 2015 and beyond. I hope every RPG nerd with a hardon for post-apoc/futuristic RPGs hears about this game, I'm certaintly going to do my part !

Styg

I was wondering, will you be taking a final look at the UI and graphics support for playing at higher resolutions?

Currently playing the game at 1900x1200 resolution, still feels abit iffy. It seems to me, that Underrail was made to be best played at lower resolutions, say 720p - Would that be a correct assumption?

Everything looks incredibly small on the screen at 1900x1200, the font, the character models, the objects and what not, and I know you can enlarge the fonts, but they look quite blurry to me, which is a shame :/

PoE as an example, did the scaling really well I think. Even in 1900x1200, everything looks properly zoomed in/out and fit to the screen, and you have the option to zoom in/out abit. It's a shame, because it something that detracts abit from an otherwise perfect game !

Another thing is the trade/bartering. Is there any plans to add numeric values to the barter screen, to determine the premise values of the items being traded? Also the "auto" feature seems abit bugged at the trade screen. Sometimes when you give a merchant something that they "want" and press auto, you can't trade, eventhough they have the credits ready for the item.


Can't wait for the final area/patch and the release !

Styg is just doing amazing work!
 

TwinkieGorilla

does a good job.
Patron
Joined
Oct 19, 2007
Messages
5,480
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath
No No! Blasphemy !!! Oddity is perfect !!! just ask this bunch of sad motherfucker oddity fanboys :D It is perfect when you kill 5 enemies of same type and get 0 oddities because they are RNG , It is perfect when one enemy type drops 3 oddity and stops giving exp and then there is like 30 more of them to kill , seems yesterday i kicked a nest of some LARPing faggots :D who enjoys skipping stuff like combat and locked rooms etc in games oh well .. some of you should stop getting so butthurt over other people's opinions

Ow, the edge!
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
No No! Blasphemy !!! Oddity is perfect !!! just ask this bunch of sad motherfucker oddity fanboys :D It is perfect when you kill 5 enemies of same type and get 0 oddities because they are RNG , It is perfect when one enemy type drops 3 oddity and stops giving exp and then there is like 30 more of them to kill , seems yesterday i kicked a nest of some LARPing faggots :D who enjoys skipping stuff like combat and locked rooms etc in games oh well .. some of you should stop getting so butthurt over other people's opinions

Build more strawmen please retard.
 

gestalt11

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 4, 2015
Messages
629
I'm new here, and most likely shouldn't say it here, how I like your mascot pics. That above is hilariuos. )))

I think both Classic and Oddity XP system suffer from the amount of meaningless containers spread across the game. In Classic system it's a chore to pick lock on every container, on Oddity system it's a chore to check every single trash can. Both systems would benefit from a slight level redesign where amount of containers would be reduced and a few more interesting container types would be introduced.

I think the point is - curiosity, thirst for exploration. Btw you don't need to poke your nose in every trash can - game has oddyties in quantities that far exceeding the demands, approximately twice.


Well one of the things with oddity is the first playthrough can be a radically different experience than the second. I am not going to say which is better or worse, people can decide for themselves. But the location based, rather than drop based oddities are static. This has the consequences of making later playthroughs have less of an exploration reward thrill and at the same makes the entire argument about searching through things completely moot. In the extreme a very meticulous person or someone using a wiki will never have to do any extraneous searching at all as they will now exactly what to look into and what not.

Conversely with classic no matter what playthrough you are on it is always rewarding to unlock something as it gives XP, it could give item/monetary rewards or not, but will always give some modest XP. So on your 5th playthrough on classic you will be incentivized to open everything by all reward systems (item, money, and advancement) whereas in Oddity you are actually only incentivized by two of the three as you probably have a very good of which containers have the oddity and which do not.

Now if some set of non-drop oddities were randomly seeded in containers in say a 20m radius this would be different for example you could concievably "hide" a particular oddity randomly in one of 5 containers that are close to each in a location. This would make the incentivization to check conatiners more similar on repeated playthroughs. This however does not happen oddity is static.

Now classic XP is also pretty static and predictable, you know exactly how much XP you will get for unlocking Y number of containers which have Z level of difficulty, its simple multiplication. The classic method is far less spotty about it though.

The nature, consequence and "feel" of the two system changes pretty substantially on later playthroughs. If you dislike going through every containe; Oddity is actually better in later playthroughs but certainly not on the first playthrough. On the other hand, for many people, its a moot point because a good number of people will check everything simple for items.

I am not sure which system will be feel better at an extreme like say a 10th full playthrough. I could see it going either way depending on people. On the first playthrough it can feel very "exploration-ish", but if you had a perfect memory and recalled where everysingle one is you would actually get almost the opposite feeling. Is a fully memorized drop table on oddity really any different than Classic? Not really because you know the exact award ahead of time on classic as well, but its less blatant because all XP is in the background. Oddity will put this behavior directly into some people's faces and some of those people will prefer Classic simply because the predicataility is less blatant because it so banal. Oddity when you have everything memorized can possibly start to feel a lot like games like MMOs that give a 50 bajillion quests meaningless quests and all you are doing in the game trying to plot an efficent pathing algorithm for maximal exp rather than playing a game. On other hand if you purpose don't keep a detailed record and just a vague idea in your mind of where oddities are this feeling can be quite different.


The two systems are radically different in how players will react in subsequent playthroughs. Classic is very regular and predictable and almost in the background. It will behave essentially the same regardless of you knowledge of the game. You may know some places that are "better XP" or methods to get XP faster. Its not as if the system has no interaction with knowledge but your basic behavior for gathering XP is essentially the same on the 1st and 10th playthrough.

Oddity can change radically but characterizing the nature and degree of this is impossible as it radically depends on people inclinations and capabilities. A players behavior can change radically on subsequent playthroughs coud literally search 1/10th the containers and recieved the same Oddity points they had at that point on the first. A different player with a poor memory or purposely not trying to remember, migth wind up only searching 9/10th. Yet another player may serach everything because they always search everything and its all a moot point. This also applies to how a player may wish to progress through locations. With great Oddity knowledge they could plot out some preferred or optimal Oddity gathering route. With no knowledge you may have far more wandering. This second aspect has an analogoues trends in classic in that some areas will be better for grinding out XP or whatever as occurs in all XP based games. In either system enough knowledge will give people the ability to plot out optimal or preferred routes and sequences. But the basic underlying behavior a player will perform can change pretty radically for Oddity and will not change substantially for Classic. Is this bad or Good ? I dunno.
 

Lone Wolf

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 17, 2014
Messages
3,703
Is this argument really necessary?

Both methods of gaining experience are provided. Click the one you prefer, and move on with your life.

I've enjoyed the novelty of the Oddities system, for what it's worth.
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
As someone who always search all containers, and who played Underrail around 6 times for 2 years (3 playtrough ended in Foundry with Camp Hathor fully completed) I prefer oddity.
 

ST'Ranger

Augur
Joined
Oct 23, 2014
Messages
306
gestalt11 I disagree with some of your premises regarding comparison between oddity and classic, but I would brofist you had I the ability simply because you were able to lay out your argument in a logical manner. The thread will have to forgive me for plowing further into this discussion.

Having played through the game extensively, my position is that the oddity system is overall superior because the actual practical effect it has is to remove the game-within-a-game that is XP grinding. With classic, the player always can ask themselves "should I do [task] or go back and do that combat again for XP?" or "should I continue on or stop here and tediously disable all these traps for XP?" etc. With oddity, there's simply no background hum of optimization niggle. The only way to "grind" XP with the oddity system is to go to newer and newer places, having depleted the old of oddities. This behavior lines up very closely with simply playing the game as if XP was handed out by a game master, at the very least much more closely than the classic system. This fact thus releases the player from the need to worry about XP, as the character's XP will be a reflection of the depth and breadth of the player's progress through the game itself.

Especially for new players, I feel it's important to communicate the superiority of the oddity system. In classic XP, there is the opportunity for an over-clever player to spend inordinate amounts of time repeating certain steps to level without actually progressing through the breadth or depth of the game itself. This is a design flaw that so many XP-based games hold, and in many of those games it's a flaw that players can benefit from substantially. This is not the case in Underrail, but that's not necessarily clear to someone new to the game. I say it's better for mankind to simply choose the oddity system and remove not only the design flaw but the potential of time poorly spent. And that's not mentioning the flavorful nature of the oddities themselves, or the great sensation of reward upon finding a cool, difficult area with a bunch of new or rare oddities.

There has been a characterization of oddity XP in this recent discussion that makes it sound like some kind of Pottery Smashing Hell where the very ground is littered with junk and boxes, all of which must be scoured for the hope of an oddity. The reality is that while many oddities do lie in random desk drawers or barrels, the highest concentrations of oddities are always sequestered behind some interesting area, tucked away behind puzzles, strong enemy groups, fortified positions, or other obstacles of note.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
I was wondering, will you be taking a final look at the UI and graphics support for playing at higher resolutions?

How big is your monitor?

It's a 24" one. 1900x1200. The Large Font option feels abit "tacked on", because the text isn't properly scaled up, it's sorta stretched. And the models, objects etc. are very small with no zoom option.

Playing at say, 1600x720p feels much more "natural"? I suppose, because I get to see more of the character models. Like I said with Pillars of Eternity, they did scaling properly to higher resos, and not just a "HI-RES" patch-feel like this game also has, in line with what Fallout 1 + 2 also have.
 

TwinkieGorilla

does a good job.
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Joined
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Messages
5,480
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath
Yeah, I was going to say go with a 1600x resolution and the larger text. I agree the text doesn't scale properly but there's nothing really wrong with it either.
 

Styg

Stygian Software
Developer
Joined
Aug 18, 2010
Messages
742
Location
Serbia
I was wondering, will you be taking a final look at the UI and graphics support for playing at higher resolutions?

There won't be any further changes to the UI. You are right in assuming that the UI wasn't originally designed for such huge resolutions, but I have no interest in redesigning it at this point (no, there are no easy solutions to this that I would find acceptable). It's far from perfect, but it's functional enough.
 

Sheepherder

Augur
Joined
Feb 4, 2014
Messages
657
I click every container, never avoid combat and do all the quests.
My gripe with both XP systems is that there's too much of the good stuff to go around. I'd always hit the level cap with a good chunk of the game still unplayed and even before that I'm always overleveled for the foes I face.
IMO game would be much better off with less XP available.
 

Grotesque

±¼ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Divinity: Original Sin Divinity: Original Sin 2
I'd always hit the level cap with a good chunk of the game still unplayed and even before that I'm always overleveled for the foes I face.

I am very disappointed to hear that.
This is what I literally abhor in a game. Reaching level cap way too soon + being overpowered to the point where combat is a chore instead of a adrenaline rich experience.
There should never be a level cap in a game. Or a ridiculous high level cap that would be impossible to reach.

And reaching the really high levels must be a reward for a player that invested time & attention for completing every side-quest and exploring thoroughly.
This can make or break the game.
The dissolution of a challenging gameplay throughout the game and playing with no reward in XP because you already reached level cap.
 

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