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I used crafting, I also plan to drop it next playthrough. I wanted a 'normal' playthrough first time - and to be honest, didn't expect difficulty to be so ludicrously low given it was decent in Conquistador.
I expect playing with less party members, and dropping crafting, would make the game quite very difficult. Crafting doesn't seem particularly interesting anyway, and that would give more weight to tinkering.
Had same issues , most of time combat is trivial then you get impossible fight like horfgard in the forest, there's no option to approach her stealthily and take down a few guys, you initiate dialog in the open with the main character who is not a tank in front.... First round berserker charge on my archer main character, then hailstorm on the party. No one is under cover , half of it is wiped or poisoned.Impossible fight when i had absolutely no trouble with anything before.
The battle of Yngiliwood one? Mainly I feel like it would have been easier if the earlier fights would have been more consistently challenging. Especially the whole area with the "cult", which was a cakewalk and shouldn't have been. I had no real reason to gear myself up heavily or carry a lot of the higher end traps and such.
I did just manage to beat it with a firepot + poison caltrops + a bit of luck on the initial volley which on max damage basically one shot anything that isn't extremely well armored. Even still I lost two characters straight off. Took about 5-6 reloads.
One thing I don't like about the wooded areas is so many places look fully covered when really they are low, wish there was a better indicator.
I'm going to put a pin in this for now and come back when things are more stable. Should've taken my own advice - never preorder. It's always the worst version of the game.
In that dight it is good to go straigt uo from the gate and then step into it from opposite site. Most archers lose los, good for surviving the buttfuck in first turn.
Of course it is E:V. So to initiate the fight that way you actually must go past 1-2 enemies in touching range and cannot stab them nor initiate combat
Finished Insane playthrough. The endgame is a bit teleporty but I'm not too fussed, I was eager to be done at that point. I did run into a fair number of bugs, and my dual wielder kept hitting himself and allies all game, but it only caused real pain a couple of times.
Trying it out now with no crafting and bringing less party members, and also a low finesse/perception protagonist - we'll see if that solves the difficulty problem.
Hello. I've been asked to post a few words about what we're working on right now.
Due to our test process, patch 1.0.3 has been in the works since a few days before 1.0.2 went live. Our main focus has been to iron out the rest of the crashes. The fire crash of course was the most common one people experienced. We finally tracked it down and fixed it yesterday. The second-most common crash now appears to be related to campsites. We've been unable to reproduce this bug on our own machines, but we've been asking those of you who reported experiencing it for your savegames, so hopefully we'll find a way to make it crash for us as well, so we can find it and fix it.
Nova and I have been busy hunting quest logic bugs. The most common bug of that nature is the Play Only Once bug which is an annoyingly common mistake where some conversations were set to only trigger once, but also had the ability to not play if certain conditions weren't met. In these cases, if you triggered the conversation before the conditions were met, for example by clicking on a character who did not yet have a nameplate or walking into a proximity trigger that was not yet active, it would still set the conversation as having played and never trigger it again. It's an extremely easy bug to fix, but finding every occurrence of it has proven tricky. Your reports have been invaluable in that respect.
We also found the cause of the negative status effects that never go away. It was caused by adding combat-status effects outside of combat, which were then never cleaned up. That too will be fixed for 1.0.3.
A major focus area for us has been the end of the game. Since this part of the game wasn't available in the closed betas for fear of spoilers, it wasn't tested nearly as well as the rest of the game. The result has been that you've found some pretty severe bugs there, including broken reinforcements in the Homestead defence fight, and the fact that loading a savegame during that sequence would completely break the game.
The upshot is that those bugs have been fixed for 1.0.3.
Right now we're working on getting three more things into the game before we make the 1.0.3 build and upload it to the beta branch:
1) It needs to be a lot easier to see which status effects affect your characters outside of combat.
2) Character animations are not being played correctly when camping. I've tracked down the cause and am doing a quick pass of all campsites now to make sure all the animations will play correctly after 1.0.3.
3) We have added a config flag to disable timeline-related game over. This is as far as we'll go. It's not going to be part of the in-game options menu because it really messes up the logic of the narrative, but you've made your dissatisfaction with the very concept of a time limit pretty clear, and we can't ignore that.
We have however also made some effort to make the timeline more clear - it's now a menacing red towards the end, and we've implemented a tutorial pop-up that will call attention to it the first time you visit the campaign map after the prologue.
All this in addition to a ton of fixes for smaller bugs reported by you all.
Thank you very much for your help so far. I don't know how we would have found all these issues without you, but I sure hope we can find a way to do better QA in the future, so the next launch will be smoother.
Unless we decide to just make match-3 games from now on. How many bugs can a match-3 game have?
Do conversation skill checks use the highest skill level in the party or just the PC? Thinking of dumping Ketill's points into Diplomacy, specifically.
Patch 1.0.4 is now public. The main purpose of this patch was to fix the last of the crashes - a particularly tricky crash that turned out to be caused by Unity's reflection probes when our day/night cycle asks them to re-render. The crash mostly happened on Intel cards and certain AMD cards.
Disabling reflection probes
If you're still getting the occasional loading screen crash or if the game is crashing during the camping timelapse, try enabling this option - especially if you're running the game on an Intel or AMD card:
1. Open your config file - it's in your Documents folder under \My Games\Expeditions Viking\Config
Locate the [VideoSettings] section, and add the following line at the bottom: ReflectionProbes=False
That's it - that should stop the crashes. Without reflection probes, the lighting in the scene will not look quite as natural as it does with the probes enabled, but it's better than crashes.
Of course we've also managed to squeeze in a bunch of other fixes and improvements while we were at it. We've even managed to add a bit more content while we were at it.
Additions and balancing
Finished two new Grimnir dream sequences and added them to the random events list
Gave Aife a new ability that's unique to her: Snaring
Added colour correction blending to the timelapse in camping
Made it more likely to get injuries when incapacitated in combat
Made non-fatal injuries more likely to deteriorate
Changed the accuracy penalty for Quick Shot from a modifier to a multiplier (ie. from 30 points to 30%)
Inspire is now limited to 3 charges
Changed Fatigued, Hungry, and Starving so they complement each other better: Fatigued now reduces Strength, Finesse, and Perception while Hungry and Starving reduces Endurance and Sense
Increased the duration on Well Fed to take into account the time spent camping
Added hotkeys for activating abilities in the hotbar
Made the game heal all injuries and reset fatigue and hunger after Hrodgærda's attack on Skjern
Tactical Move can no longer be activated if you would have no moves left afterwards, to prevent you from cheating yourself
Grimulfr will no longer show up in Skjern during summer until you've completed the main objective in Scarborough
Made it so you get the Gain Power goal instead of the Speak To Skallagrimr goal if you side with Aiblinn in Dun Phris before you've done Lindisfarne
Characters no longer drop Salvage
Added a wave of reinforcements to the entrance guards in Jelling and did a general polish pass on the scene
Added a bunch of deco characters fighting in the background in Jelling, and a few civilians that will flee if you approach them - also made a couple of houses burn
All Northumbrian and Pict quests will now be failed when you side with Aiblinn in Dun Phris, to avoid narrative inconsistency
Disabled some of the York entrance one-liners in the event you've invaded Northumbria, and made it so the guards are replaced by either Picts or Vikings depending on your choices
Bug fixes
Improved stability.
Fixed Fog of War not being reset correctly when starting a new game
Fixed a gamebreaking quest logic bug whereby Myrddin would be noninteractive if you fought the villagers without him and Cillian died (because a goal was set as optional when it should have been mandatory)
Fixed the treasure in the passage grave becoming uninteractive if you lose the fight against the Underground Ones and subsequently choose not to pick up the treasure first time you interact with it
Fixed an issue where you wouldn't be able to complete Parsley Sage Rosemary Thyme if you let Morcant go after raiding the monastery
Fixed the Red Wedding quest never being closed if you enter the house during the night without making use of the option to wait outside (it wasn't breaking anything, but it was annoying)
Fixed the Meet Maucolyn goal not getting correctly closed in Parsley Sage Rosemary Thyme if you decided to attack
Fixed Wearh in the Woods not being closed properly if you attacked the village after having found the pelts
Fix an issue in camping that would result in incorrect amount of resources being reserved
Crafting schematics are now removed while crafting as intended
Fixed items with special properties that raise HP not raising the actual HP but only the maximums - now you'll actually have the extra HP as you should
Added new color tags for stat mods in inventory and character stats for the other languages
Disabled save game inside Passage grave
Fixed FOW issues in some of the camp scenes
Fixed Seeking Sanctuary not getting closed correctly if you had a change of heart and killed the Persecutors before meeting the Refugees
Fixed sinking into the ground on the hex map around the bridge in Chester
Fixed the check whether you had been inside the walls in Chester already not being correctly set
Fixed the chest in the Chester Sewers being lootable twice
Changed the color correction in the Chester Sewers
Fixed being able to take the runaway guard's body in Scoundrel's Flight if you had already gone into the tomb
Fixed being able to use the runaway guard and his girlfriend's bodies for the sacrifice when they weren't dead
Fixed Cillian not despawning correctly when Myrddin buries him
Made sure Cillian's pyre is put out at appropriate times and made Talorc and Dubglas move to better positions when they set Cillian free
Fixed being able to collect something for the Wisdom of the Ancients quest before you had gotten it
Fixed not being able to cross the river by York on the campaign map
Switched the numbers for schematics in armour crafting to be consistent with how the numbers are displayed in the Tinkering menu
Fixed the tutorial window we added in 1.0.3 not updating step text correctly
Confirmation boxes originating from conversation can't be dismissed anymore (which means you can no longer avoid travel ambushes by pressing Escape...)
Fixed the food selection in camping prioritising Rations rather than Meat
Tyr's Favour can now only be used by Viking enemies as intended - it's a bit of a hack for now, as the AI skill selection will still assign Galder to non-Vikings, but we'll deal with that later
Cleaned up and polished the ambient audio in Jelling
Fixed Wreckers in Scarborough not staying gone if you had gotten rid of them peacefully
Fixed the looters in Donncoirce Homestead coming back if you had convinced them to leave
Changed the trigger conditions for the intro to the swamp meeting so it's more robust, even though we haven't managed to figure out how some players have entered the scene before they got the quest
Fixed damage reduction not being clamped correctly so high-level enemies affected by Tyr's Favour could exceed 100%, which made attacks heal them for the duration of the status effect
Fixed sparing Cailtram at Domnall's farm not being properly closed if you just left after getting the proof
Fixed the farmer inside Domnall's farmhouse not correctly responding if you hadn't fought the people outside
Fixed the player gaining String instead of losing it when pulling out a rotten tooth
Fixed the Armourer and Craftsmen Homestead upgrades giving you the opposite resource of what they should give
Fixed an issue where crafted armours and helmets might not have the right models
Fixed being able to repeat geting the reward for rescuing Mani from Sandarr
Fixed not being able to find the missing wrecker in Scarborough if you had searched his corpse before getting the quest
Added headlines to the skill rank tooltips in Crafting so it's a bit more clear what they mean
Fixed a localisation issue on discard prompt
Fixed CNodeLogicWaitForAIGroupToSpawn node not working properly, which caused problems in the cave fight in the ravine if you were skipping too quickly through the dialogue
Made the family from the Troll Tree not show up later if either of the parents were killed
Fixed Æthelred's war camp not disappearing from Yngilwood if you fail the Northumbria questline early, and disabled some of the entrance one-liners related to the camp once it's gone
Made some control labels a little clearer, fixed two small spelling mistakes in the English tutorials
Fixed the generic clansmen and Kveldulfr not acknowledging Asleifr's death correctly because the conversations were checking an obsolete variable
Fixed French localization parsing for the patterns that change a word based on whether the word after it starts with a vowel or a consonant (eg. de or d')
Fixed a wrong ending of a dynamic gender text token that was causing the unparsed token to show up in the text
Tweaked the colliders in the roadside camp to make it easier to pick up the stuff in the tent
Fixed null ref when initializing prop items and fixed the GOG SDK not recognizing the DLC when not connected to Galaxy
Fixed two one-liners playing over each other in Seahenge, and set up better party spawn positions
Increased amount of cairns needed to unlock the Wayfarer achievement (it was looking for 7 but there are actually 9) and fixed the cairn in Lindisfarne not being counted towards the 14 cairns for the Pathfinder achievement
Made the game logic that triggers Osred's conversation with Æthelred after his defeat a bit more robust to ensure that it won't get stuck
Added a config option for disabling reflection probes to solve the loading screen crashes that happen in certain scenes on certain video cards (thanks Unity)
As always, we'd like to thank you all for your help in identifying these issues. Now that the worst bugs are ironed out and the game is in roughly the shape we thought it was in when we released it, we're going to start digging into the nice-to-have list. The next update will take a bit longer, but it'll also contain a bunch of new stuff. Stay tuned for more information
I'm very close to finishing the game and will be doing so shortly. Really enjoying it so far but agree that the combat needs tweaking.
Just wondering if anyone else feels that the writing creates a strong incentive to go the "crush everyone" route.
The first king you meet is Osred, who basically wants nothing to do with you. Ok, screw him.
Then you meet his rival in the woods who doesn't seem like the most promising ally.
So before doing those quests, I went to check out the Picts. At first, this seemed promising. This king is much more respectful and an alliance seems possible. So I track down and kill his rival. Then I do the quests to get the Gaels to like him more. He's now undisputed king and I've at least doubled the size of his army, not to mention spared any men he would have lost doing this shit with his own people. His rival Osred is still fighting a civil war at this point. Ask him to reciprocate and send a token force to back me up at home and the response: "lol, I can't do that because my enemies are divided and dis makes me scare because reasons. Halp me take the another kingdum and I will keep teh promise, rofl." The lack of dialogue options pointing out that what he's telling me makes no sense is a little annoying. So I tell him OK, then I sail to Orkneyjar and start the process of building an invasion force - still thinking I won't need it.
Go back to the woods and facilitate the overthrow of Osred. Go visit my new ally on his new throne. Same bullshit only his excuse is somewhat more sensible since the Picts and Gaels are now a unified threat (I'm sure if this is not yet the case, there is some other excuse). Bottom line is, I have to help him take over a 2nd kingdom now or no help. I pick the more aggressive dialogue options and still no dice plus his assurances sound like total bullshit.
Oh and also they both want you to kill the people at Dun Phries, which is the only faction in the game that seems to understand what a reciprocal alliance is.
Both of these greedy goal line moving fucks are begging to be killed. I'm not done with the Heathen Army invasion yet but so far the dialogue options seem to take the slant that I'm the betrayer who betrayed my "allies". I may not be given the chance to point out to these jagovs never actually acted as allies and that it is their own greed that did them in, but that is OK because I am going to kill them.
Anyway, the point of my rant is that the writing isn't bad, but it definitely presents trusting these guys as an extremely risky move. Knowing this is a game, I'm sure you can side with either and get a decent ending. But from a role playing perspective, why would anyone continue to work with either of these assholes?
Edit: I think a better option would have been for the kings to agree to help you, then something happens that would prevent them from doing so unless you continue to help them
I'm very close to finishing the game and will be doing so shortly. Really enjoying it so far but agree that the combat needs tweaking.
Just wondering if anyone else feels that the writing creates a strong incentive to go the "crush everyone" route.
The first king you meet is Osred, who basically wants nothing to do with you. Ok, screw him.
Then you meet his rival in the woods who doesn't seem like the most promising ally.
So before doing those quests, I went to check out the Picts. At first, this seemed promising. This king is much more respectful and an alliance seems possible. So I track down and kill his rival. Then I do the quests to get the Gaels to like him more. He's now undisputed king and I've at least doubled the size of his army, not to mention spared any men he would have lost doing this shit with his own people. His rival Osred is still fighting a civil war at this point. Ask him to reciprocate and send a token force to back me up at home and the response: "lol, I can't do that because my enemies are divided and dis makes me scare because reasons. Halp me take the another kingdum and I will keep teh promise, rofl." The lack of dialogue options pointing out that what he's telling me makes no sense is a little annoying. So I tell him OK, then I sail to Orkneyjar and start the process of building an invasion force - still thinking I won't need it.
Go back to the woods and facilitate the overthrow of Osred. Go visit my new ally on his new throne. Same bullshit only his excuse is somewhat more sensible since the Picts and Gaels are now a unified threat (I'm sure if this is not yet the case, there is some other excuse). Bottom line is, I have to help him take over a 2nd kingdom now or no help. I pick the more aggressive dialogue options and still no dice plus his assurances sound like total bullshit.
Oh and also they both want you to kill the people at Dun Phries, which is the only faction in the game that seems to understand what a reciprocal alliance is.
Both of these greedy goal line moving fucks are begging to be killed. I'm not done with the Heathen Army invasion yet but so far the dialogue options seem to take the slant that I'm the betrayer who betrayed my "allies". I may not be given the chance to point out to these jagovs never actually acted as allies and that it is their own greed that did them in, but that is OK because I am going to kill them.
Anyway, the point of my rant is that the writing isn't bad, but it definitely presents trusting these guys as an extremely risky move. Knowing this is a game, I'm sure you can side with either and get a decent ending. But from a role playing perspective, why would anyone continue to work with either of these assholes?
Edit: I think a better option would have been for the kings to agree to help you, then something happens that would prevent them from doing so unless you continue to help them
I think the logic behind that was, political alliances are always more nebulous and less explicitly quid pro quid than the participants would like, and a bunch of smelly Norsemen who's not even anywhere near king in their own homeland will have trouble pressuring these guys to remember how you helped them when they don't need you anymore.
The whole "we want to help you but um here's another problem" route does occur, though, for both dudes? I mean, that's exactly what they say when they need your help with that town. They are more forthcoming afterwards.
So I've beaten the game and I'm wondering if there's enough distinct interesting content to load back to before choosing which kingdom gets Dun Phiris and picking a side instead of going the invasion route. Any opinions?
So I've beaten the game and I'm wondering if there's enough distinct interesting content to load back to before choosing which kingdom gets Dun Phiris and picking a side instead of going the invasion route. Any opinions?
As far as I've seen, pick a side = invade the other, then Althing + Endgame. go independent = invade both sides (though you choose one to handle yourself), then Althing + Endgame. go trading pacifist = invade nobody, then Althing + Endgame. It's all the same. You actually would get more variety from doing things like fighting or helping the villagers on that initial coastal area.
I hope so. I've been waiting for the next patch which is rumored to be addressing some of the issues with difficulty before I give it a proper playthrough. Starting to get a little tired of waiting with no news.
Hello, and thanks for checking in with us again. Today we've released update 1.0.5 for Expeditions: Viking. In addition to some bug fixes, this version contains several major changes to game balance that I will outline separately before we get to the change log.
New caps on skill ranks
The most significant change we've made is to introduce caps on all skill ranks based on the total amount of skill points you've spent. Ranks 1 and 2 are freely accessible, but in order to upgrade a skill to rank 3 you must have spent a total of 100 SP. To reach rank 4, you must have spent 175, and to max out a skill at rank 5 you must have spent a total of 250 SP. Recall that you begin the game with 50 SP and that there is a total of just over 300 SP in the campaign. The result is that you'll have no skills above rank 3 when you go to Britain, and you won't be able to level up to rank 5 until quite late in the game.
This update trades away some freedom of choice to enforce a better levelling curve. Previously, we let you max out your weapon skills quite early in the game, with the predictable result that you would outpace the enemies before you even reached Britain, and the enemies wouldn't begin to catch up until near the end of the game. Now, you're forced to distribute your points among the different categories, perhaps buying some Utility and Passive skills for a more well-rounded character. This does have the drawback that characters will be a bit less specialised, but the improvement to the game's difficult curve is profound.
Surprise round on enemy initiative
A new feature is the so-called Surprise Round, which occurs when you trigger an encounter where the enemy acts first. Previously the enemy would get a full turn before you had any chance to position your hirdmen. Since there is no formation system in the game, this felt unfair. From version 1.0.5 and onwards, the player always acts first, but in encounters where the enemy would previously begin, the player will not have any attack action, nor a bonus action in the first turn. In other words you can only move or change your weapons in your first turn because your party was caught by surprise. This has also allowed us to change the initiative back to Enemy-first on all the encounters that were previously set to Player-first to avoid unfairness. The result is a slight but significant increase in difficulty in many encounters throughout the game.
Bear in mind that this update is not the final word on difficulty. These are major changes that will fix our difficulty issues, but they are not intended to increase the upper ends of difficulty on the Hard and Insane settings. The next update will contain more tweaks intended to make the Hard and Insane settings live up to their name, as well as the promised Iron Man mode.
And now for the full change list. As with the 1.0.4 update, I have divided it into two sections: one for changes and additions, and one for fixes. Since this update has a far greater variety of changes than previous patches, I've decided to further subdivide each section into categories based on the type of change or fix.
Changes and additions
New stuff
As explained above, added new "surprise round" feature to allow player positioning before enemy turn when ambushed
Added full Danish localisation
Added three new campsite scenes to the Denmark campaign for improved visual variation: Plains 2, Marsh 2, and Deep Forest
Added new animations for Taunt and Dust abilities
Added a new generic support ability animation for when you're wielding a spear
Added an animation for consumable utility items (ie. drinking potions)
Skills and items
As described above, skill upgrades are now capped by your total amount of SP spent, so you must spend 150 SP to upgrade a skill to rank 3, 200 for rank 4, and 250 for rank 5
Made substantial improvements to the algorithm that assigns skills to enemies by rank and archetype, which will increase the effectiveness of enemies throughout the game
Made the Archer archetype use axe and shield instead of dane-axe or spear, and changed the loadouts of all Archer characters in the game accordingly
Items crafted with the Artisan skill can no longer get the "Cursed" property
Decreased the cost reduction for repairing and the gain % from deconstructing items
Discarding a weapon will now yield at least 1 Salvage or Hide even if you have no Repair skill
Increased item degradation during combat from 1 point per crit to 10% of max durability per crit
Added a 50% chance each round that a character is on fire that they'll get a Burn injury - subsequent rounds of being on fire then has a 25% chance of the injury deteriorating
Taunt will now make the target move towards the caster even if they can't entirely reach them - they'll just move as far as they can
Changed the Aimed Shot ability to have a 40% damage penalty instead of a 5 percent-point crit chance bonus, and changed Sharpshooter to reduce that penalty from 40% to 20%
Sharpshooter now requires Bow on rank 3, Steady Hands no longer has a skill requirement, and Backstabber now costs 4 SP instead of 8
Accuracy for ranged attacks now falls off by 6 points per hex instead of 5
Walk Your Shots now reduces the per-hex distance fall-off for ranged attacks back to 5 instead of simply adding 5 points every time you take a shot
Parrying no longer cancels all damage from the parried attack - the parrying character takes damage as normal, but with the doubled base DR from Parrying
Changed Opportunist so that attacks of opportunity now apply Stunned to the target if you have the skill, instead of just giving you an extra AoO every round - also raised its cost from 3 SP to 6
Increased the damage of Hailstorm from 50% normal attack damage to 75% normal attack damage and reduced its charges from 2 to 1
Changed Stone Fists from a 10 point bonus to Melee Damage to a 10 point bonus to Armour Piercing damage
Raised the cost of Powerful Kick from 6 SP to 9
Revive is now restricted to 2 charges
Gave pit traps a massive damage buff
Increased all Tinkering material costs
Reach weapons no longer inflict non-lethal damage at close range, since this was not explained anywhere
Encounters
Changed quite a few of the encounters in the game to have the enemies start, which is no longer frustrating now that we have the surprise round feature
Nerfed the damage of all wolf types except the Wolf Mothers, whose damage is now doubled
Added a couple of guards in Perth's treasury and set all the loot in the main area to Owned - when you visit during the betrayal, the guards have been killed and the loot is no longer Owned
Buffed all occupied campsite fights in Britain and tweaked the cover in some of the scenes
Buffed the assassins in Ribe
Buffed the fight against the youngsters in the Ravine Cave
All the bounty fights have received a significant buff
Added reinforcements to both of the wall fights during the invasion of York
Doubled the number of enemies in the prisoner room fight in York's dungeon
Made Leofric and Steinn brown-haired and made Steinn waaa-hay-haaay more badass
The monks and nuns in Lindisfarne Church and the Scarborough Convent will now run into corners and cower in fear when you attack (the Cower animation is new)
Made the female guard outside the Skerninge passage grave drop a damaged, cursed chain mail upon her death
Other changes
Added icon tooltips to the Tinkering menu
Injuries now deteriorate in combat with a probability based on how long the character has been incapacitated - characters can never die outright in combat, however
Injuries now deteriorate during camping as well, and we've added some UI logic for this to work - fatally injured characters can die when you make camp if left untreated
Increased injury penalties
Tweaked injury settings to allow groin and chest punctures and eye trauma
Reduced the Armour-smithing level of every blacksmith in the game by 1
Made the faction reputation number show up even when your faction reputation is Neutral
Added a menu option for disabling reflection probes so you don't have to mess with the config
Made the farmer in Skerninge and his wife lie on the ground to match the description text
Added thrall deco characters to the homestead depending on how many Slaves you have (up to about a dozen)
Added a Medium reputation increase if you complete the Rats quest peacefully
Reflection probes will now automatically be disabled the first time you launch the game on an Intel videocard, and you'll get a pop-up about it - you can manually re-enable them afterwards if you'll risk it
Tweaked the morale changes in the initial conversation with Maban so they're more intuitive
Bug fixes
Stability and performance
Fixed one more set of crashes related to loading characters into the scene
Fixed the unreproducible issue some players had reported where the game would crash at the end of camping and potentially at the end of a fight
Added check so corrupted fog of war files do not prevent loading scenes
Made some optimisation in the level loading
Quest logic
Fixed the Ab Urbe Condita side quest hanging around in your quest log even if you choose an outcome for Chester that causes Fabian Quintus to leave, so you can't complete it anymore
Fixed a bug whereby Myrddin would not spawn in the stone circle if you entered his cave instead of bringing Cillian directly to him after the rescue
Fixed a spot where you could get stuck after the battle for Yngilwood
Fixed a bug where you could start the Snakes Among the Trees or Lost Hunting Party side quests during the Battle of Yngilwood if you hadn't started them previously
Fixed the fight at the entrance to Jelling potentially repeating with no enemies if you leave the town through the hidden tunnel and then attempt to re-enter it from outside
Fixed an issue where Grainne would sometimes appear inside Caustantin's hall after the wedding when she wasn't supposed to
Fixed a bug whereby you could no longer free the Yngilwood Scout's loved one in the York Dungeon if you chose not to do so the first time you were given the option
Added a fade-out if you sentence Geirmundr in Orkney to the blood eagle, during which he'll be despawned
Fixed the non-interactive parts of Geirmundr's "camp" in Orkney also highlighting along with the interactive parts
Skallagrimr and the other thegns will now disappear from Steinn's house once you complete the first of the Viking ending quests
Received and implemented the Russian and French versions of a single branch of conversation with Hulda that had been missed in the original localisations for those two languages
Fixed the higher difficulty-related completion achievements not unlocking the lower levels
Fixed being able to interact with the haystack behind Erlingr's farm after the fight if you already set fire to it once
Fixed the fire in Erlingr's farmhouse persisting forever (it now stops once the quest is closed)
Fixed most of the dead characters who were supposed to show up as ghosts in Grimnir's Helheimr dream not showing up
Fixed Olbjørn and Grimkell's character spawners creating a very long delay in loading the goodbye scene in Skjern if they were killed on Holmgang Island
Fixed Maucolyn not being set as immortal if you encounter him at the village after raiding the monastery, which could result in you speaking to a very clearly dead man
Fixed Conall mac Taidg's death variable not being set, causing some narrative inconsistencies
Fixed an error when teleporting the player party to waypoints in conversations which showed up if you lost the fight against Maucolyn in front of the village
Fixed a bug whereby if you set an ambush for Osred's men in The Mercian Connection and leave any of them alive, the fight in front of the Roman tower wouldn't begin
Osred's spy token will now be removed from your inventory when you show it to a scout in Yngilwood
Changed the logic in Torfinn's tree conversations a bit to make the quest more robust
Reduced the trigger radius on the sewer tunnel conversation in Chester to be what it's supposed to be
Skills and items
Fixed a bug that was causing characters to play their incapacitation barks at entirely the wrong times during combat
Fixed the highest rank ability of each skill not displaying its action type in its tooltip
Fixed several issues with the implementation of Gungnir's special property - the weapon will now damage enemies in the two hexes in front of you, three if you're using Extend
Fixed an issue where pre-damaged looted items would be using the current Salvage value to calculate tiers rather than the undamaged one
Resistances are now capped at 100% in the UI
Fixed Adrenaline Junkie applying its bonus as soon as a character is at less than max health, instead of only when they drop below 20% as described
Fixed the missing icon for the British silver cross talisman types
Replaced an old hack to prevent non-Vikings from getting the Dane-Axe skill with a more general solution that checks the nationality condition for all skills before assigning them (this will also prevent non-Vikings from buying Galder, which they cannot use anyway)
Removed the track quest input from all contexts except Default (which will stop it showing up in the other sections of the input bindings)
Fixed the Amulet of Macha not getting its special property correctly (this fix is not retroactive, if you already picked up the Amulet of Macha, it will remain useless - however you can give yourself a new, working amulet with the console command giveitem party Talisman_Macha)
Fixed a 10-second pause caused by a timeout if a Parrying character is Stunned and subsequently attacked; all immobilisation now cancels Parrying as well as Hypnotised, Interrupting, Panicked, and Ready
You can no longer parry attacks from weapons with reach from 2 or more tiles away
Fixed missing sound effects on the Parrying animations
You can no longer trigger an execution with any weapon type other than a sword
Fixed a pretty unlikely combat timeout that would happen if Condemned characters took fire damage
Fixed the Tactical Move button being selectable even if no attack action was possible
Fixed Stunned animation not being reset if a character is defeated while that animation is playing
Fixed the wolf mothers' Nuzzle ability placing the wolf inside the incapacitated wolf's tile instead of adjacent to it
Fixed wrong health displayed in the UI when using Nuzzle or Revive
Fixed the Sacrament ability tripling ally resistances instead of doubling it as intended
Other fixes
Fixed certain music tracks being controlled by the main volume slider instead of the music slider
Fixed the input system overwriting user settings with the defaults in some situations
Removed Crouch Control from the input settings
Fixed non-lethal attacks being able to proc critical hits
Fixed certain blacksmiths being set up with a higher armour-smithing rating than is actually possible, which broke the UI
Fixed bug where an occupied campsite would be marked as captured when entering the campsite but then reloading the previous saved file without even playing through the fight
Fixed an issue where tinkering items in camping might not be loaded properly by the save system
Fixed a missing line of subtitles in the intro cinematic in English and English (Norse Names)
Fixed the player's ship reverting to the default sail colours in Orkney
A loading screen will now be displayed while loading the main menu after the credits
Fixed dead follower pop-up appearing during loading screens if you made a save after a follower had died in the scene and then loaded that save
Fixed a typo "a dirty flash" (should have been flask) in Røskva's first romance conversation
Fixed a typo in the to-do list reminder for unassigned shifts
Nefja and Ketill can no longer die from injuries in Denmark
Fixed switch weapon button being greyed out after an attack of opportunity on the selected character
Fixed the localisation ID for homestead upgrades not being retrieved correctly for upgrades that only have 1 branch
Removed an erroneously placed trash pile in Skerninge which was unlootable and would disappear when you looted another trash pile next to it
Removed a lootable barrel from inside a house in Perth
Added ability icons for the wolf abilities so they don't show up as white squares when you look at wolves with the character info panel, and added explanatory tooltips for them as well
Fixed a weird-looking tree in the Britain forest menhir campsite
Surprise round on enemy initiative
A new feature is the so-called Surprise Round, which occurs when you trigger an encounter where the enemy acts first. Previously the enemy would get a full turn before you had any chance to position your hirdmen. Since there is no formation system in the game, this felt unfair. From version 1.0.5 and onwards, the player always acts first, but in encounters where the enemy would previously begin, the player will not have any attack action, nor a bonus action in the first turn. In other words you can only move or change your weapons in your first turn because your party was caught by surprise. This has also allowed us to change the initiative back to Enemy-first on all the encounters that were previously set to Player-first to avoid unfairness. The result is a slight but significant increase in difficulty in many encounters throughout the game.
Sounds like a hacky workaround. I would abuse the hell out of this.
Bear in mind that this update is not the final word on difficulty. These are major changes that will fix our difficulty issues, but they are not intended to increase the upper ends of difficulty on the Hard and Insane settings. The next update will contain more tweaks intended to make the Hard and Insane settings live up to their name, as well as the promised Iron Man mode.
Hacky or not, it was much needed. Sort of goes against the essence of a tactical game to have a dumb engage you have no control over over and over again.
