Pathfinder Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition - now with turn-based combat

[Haplo]

Yeah, I rather like seeing the potential of my character realized and enjoying full effectiveness of a build and the full spectrum of abilities or spells.

But I would be fine with a series of smaller modules that goes like 1-10, 11-15, 16-20 or such.

 

[siroptimusprime]

Got around to clearing some of the optional Big Bads and it made me yearn for some actual difficulty. I hear the game ramps up hard in the end but even on Strengthened enemies with normal damage and the DC difficulty one step above nornal, lvl 12 and up content has felt so easy. The game needs a tactics mod for AI as well as a shitload more casters in encounters. Well, non-bards and conjurers. At least the bards make sense in Pitax but JFC did nobody there learn how to cast sirocco?

Spoiler

The lich in the barrow was an actual joke despite the wails that got 3 of my party members. Valerie and Amiri chunked him anyways and I had enough resurrections to deal with it. Maybe I could have optimized to go 0 deaths but a lot of that would be running around hoping to avoid the wail aoe. idk if possible in that room. He didn't dominate or summon anything other than some shitty wisps that I could snap resist energy to deal with, and maybe I got lucky but he didn't prismatic spray or wilt or do any of that. I wish he had like 2 trapped apprentices or something that were killer mages of their own who could do holds and summons and whatnot to make it more complicated. Would require a bigger room tho. Haven't even sniffed a feeblemind thrown my way either.

Ithuliak (sp?) was harder but only because of his polar midnight and a few dominate persons that snagged Val and Amiri. If my PC wasn't a megamorphed dragon as well they would have probably gibbed my whole party. Not enough SR and p shit APR. Just juice him more and give him a few shamans willing to controlled fireball or feeblemind.

Ghost in Pitax basement was hard until I remembered DD existed. Instead of waltzing in with my stupid dragon taking up all the room and letting him prebuff I just warped in and chunked him. He got the wails off but again, just tanked it. The same tactics worked for the 2 gnomes upstairs but they also got some sprays off but I don't recall if they had much impact.

I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting but is there another somewhere? I haven't read up on all the content because there's so fucking much of it. I could be missing something gigantic. Great game but it hasn't really stood up perfectly in the encounter design atm.

 

[Grunker]

I wouldn't mind them cutting out 16-20. The gameplay is already breaking down for me here at 11-13.

 

[Grunker]

siroptimusprime the game is balls-to-the-walls hard in the beginning, then decent during level 6+, and then on 10-11+ it just takes a nosedive into obscure "LOL GG EASY"-mode. I can't remember the last time I paused during combat.

So yeah, Path of the Damned/Sword Coast Stratagems is sorely needed (especially the latter letting enemies prebuff, making them use dispels on you and giving selected enemies some cast-levels would be grate). Current difficulty turn up doesn't really pressure your tactical ability, it just pressures the amount of viable builds because you have to output higher numbers faster to kill the enemies. I rarely, if ever, use any spells that aren't buffs or deal damage (directly or indirectly) in some way during combat.

In fact, it speaks to the game's strengths that it's still fun even though the combat hasn't been engaging for the last 4 levels.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

The engine is crap.
- letting the save run in a separate thread was "too hard" so eventually the screen grinds to a halt for several seconds every time you save
- on some maps there's a terrible stutter, sometimes for several seconds, some effects like snowing seem also very poorly optimized
- mouse behaviour that is so fucking retarded it can drive you nuts, you have to press ctrl to get the mouse behavior you know from every other piece of software, who comes up with this shit?
- userinterface is bad, click a button, nothing happens, click again, button to the right of the one you actually clicked is triggered
- no action q
- you disable the option that the game spams your hotbars with abilities, what happens? Game continues to spam your hotbars with inane crap. How fucking hard can it be?
- constant random activating of rods/abilities like impromptu sneak attack/AT invisibility thingie when loading a game - even if they were deactivated previously
- characters discarding hold command, when I say hold I mean hold, even if I make the char cast a spell or whatever, that's no reason to discard the hold command, annoying as fuck
- area design not taking properly into account the size of mobs, especially, pets, summons, enlarged mobs, desperately needs party members be allowed to move thru other party members, yes that means sometimes actually getting to a mob is a bigger challenge than defeating it

Most of my gripes with the game stem from the craptastic engine and the bad interface. I'd prefer a slick and functional UI over one that looks good.

 

[Daidre]

My impression that most difficult fight in all game is attack on Oleg Post on Unfair in ch1. Especially after they fixed bugged Rune domain and all bug-users need to do it proper way now.

it just takes a nosedive into obscure "LOL GG EASY"

And than Wild Hunt appears and starts to rape your supercool party again and again.

 

[siroptimusprime]

Grunker, yeah I started on normal and it was pretty rough even with TT experience. I've been steadily upping it until I realized going past my current settings just made every random schmuck a Godlike being and all the big bads turn into slot machines. The stat inflation is pretty hilarious even on Strengthened.

 

[Grunker]

^ wouldn't have a problem with stat inflation if it meant you had to use a wider spectrum of your arsenal or do stuff differently. But it generally just means you either have to focus your build more (taking options away instead of adding them) towards specific optimization or live with the fact that the dice rolls take over the combat somewhat. I lost within 3 seconds in my first Armag try because he 1-shot two of my frontliners. Then I reloaded the game and did it without pausing or getting damaged. I didn't change my strategy, I still just selected everyone and clicked.

Now anyone familiar with Pathfinder and 3.5 in general could have told you that would happen if the encounters didn't account for it. But when you look at how massive and detailed the game is, it sort of becomes clear that encounter design was probably one of the things that took a hit. The game has fairly formulaic encounters a lot of the time and a lot of the trash feels "plopped down" without much thought.

I'm still going to play on the highest difficulty next go I think though, because if nothing changes (as it hopefully will, like Daidre says) I will probably get bored by the otherwise fun combat of this game.

VentilatorOfDoom that's weird, I have next to none of those issues (save the saving/loading of course). I would even go so far as to say that as far as RT unit control games I've played this gets high marks in the "does this unit do what I tell it to"-department. I also think the UI is pretty damned functional. Simple and easy to understand.

 

[Daidre]

The engine is crap.

I agree with you about weird mouse clicks and rod modals but this:

- letting the save run in a separate thread was "too hard" so eventually the screen grinds to a halt for several seconds every time you save
- on some maps there's a terrible stutter, sometimes for several seconds, some effects like snowing seem also very poorly optimized

Is symptoms of your CPU not being fast enough to run the game smoothly. I had hardware upgrade not so long ago and all similar issues became past with my old i5-3570k.

Also, sending save process to another thread is a bad idea. Game zip/unzips files and that is what takes most of save-time. It is huge simultaneous load on all CPU Cores/threads. When I press F5 my CPU easily goes from usual 15-30% load to 70-80%. Isolating it to separate thread will ramp save time to x5 at minimum.

 

[eggdogg]

Have they finished patching the game yet? It was beyond frustrating to launch the game only to have tons of patches to download. I eventually stop playing but will resume when the constant patching stops.

 

[Grunker]

Like I said, quite a large part of the save problem could be dealt with by just clearing your saves of stuff more often. I mean I get why they feel they need to maintain some loot in containers, for instance, but no one is going back to that area for seven daggers and ten leather armors. Or a gazillion kobold corpses in Old Sycamore which are still in my save file in Chapter 5

 

[ga♥]

You have to consider that they nerfed the beginning a lot compared to 1.0.x. I remember Tartuccio mercenaries ripping myself a second asshole in the ancient tomb (reloading like 10x+). Or the Bandits at the Thorn Ford (? i can't remember what was the name), or even the Technic league first encounter.

Like on Unfair, the prologue was literally impossible.

On 1.1 everything was a cake.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Is symptoms of your CPU not being fast enough to run the game smoothly. I had hardware upgrade not so long ago and all similar issues became past with my old i5-3570k.

I'm sorry, I have a monster rig that runs TW3 on ultra without the fans producing as much as a noise (dual 1080gtx ti). What kind of computer do I need to run this game properly? When my fans start to howl when running this "graphically demanding" unity game - all this tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the engine. And yes, serializing large amounts of data into json format is not exactly the most performant way to handle this savegame business.
If you look at pretty much any other game, even >10 year old ones like Dragon Age or ME, they too take several seconds to save, but they don't halt your userinterface while doing so. Your assertion that save time would increase dramatically by not locking the thread that runs the game/ui/graphics while saving is complete nonsense, and I never have observed this in all those games that do it.
i7-5820k has 6 cores, 12 cpu threads
Kingmaker uses exactly 1. One fucking thread. Is it a wonder this engine runs like shit on modern CPUs?

 

[Daidre]

Kingmaker loads all 8 cores on my 9700k is perfectly even. If yours uses only one core than something really wrong with your drivers, windows (could be old or new bug in 10) or BIOS settings.

Spoiler

Or maybe unity really hates hyper threading in general.
Or SLI. After all years in development it is still rare shit that completely destroys performance in 2/3 games with freezes if company did not have agreement with Nvidia to optimize drivers especially for them.

 

[Terra]

So, the location of Armag's Tomb.

Spoiler

I met some crazy cleric on a raft and had Ekun do some athetics checks to receive a vision of where the tomb was. Ekun's body was apparently "not breathing anymore" after the ordeal however he seemed entirely unaffected by the experience.

Since nothing new has appeared on the map, are you forced to uncover the location via on of the Kingdom Events/Projects?

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Not necessarily

Spoiler

I just walked a little to the south of the location where the battle with the barbarians was and it was right there. Dunno if that was a bug or some lucky perception check but I found it just by walking on the map. That was before I finished either of the projects that were supposed to find it.

 

[ga♥]

If you fail the perception check, which is quite high, you can use the events/research OR visit a little book episode area in the area that could help you but requires skill checks too (not perception IIRC).

 

[Incendax]

My impression that most difficult fight in all game is attack on Oleg Post on Unfair in ch1. Especially after they fixed bugged Rune domain and all bug-users need to do it proper way now.

It was definitely a bitch. The melee trash die to traps and clever movement, but it only takes a few hits for the archers to murder you. And all the while, Bokken is blowing shit up and killing unconscious allies. And even if you win, there's a chance the bandits killed Bokken or something.

Of course, I also remember the horror of those first 3 wolves on Unfair. *Shudders*

 

[Yosharian]

A lot of these can be chalked up to 'russian developer making their first real game', if we're being charitable.

And considering it dunks massively on Deadfire, which is the complete opposite of that, being a sequel made by a company that was founded 16 years ago and could (again, charitably) be considered veterans...

Yeah, I really adore this game, despite its many flaws (and the save stutter thing is detestable in particular).

The problem now is if they do the usual that developers, which is focusing their time and effort on all the wrong things instead of just pumping out bigger and better. It doesn't bode well that their immediate future concerns seem to be shitting out a console port, of all things.

 

[thesheeep]

The problem now is if they do the usual that developers, which is focusing their time and effort on all the wrong things instead of just pumping out bigger and better. It doesn't bode well that their immediate future concerns seem to be shitting out a console port, of all things.

Quite possibly a contractual obligation more than anything.

 

[Grunker]

Why are we against console players paying for the development of PC games

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Why are we against console players paying for the development of PC games

It's a slippery slope. Ever seen a proper PC game being played on the console? It's a crap gameplay experience, navigating thru countless menus to find/cast a spell or use an ability for instance. After all console players complained endlessly (quite understandably tbh) the next game will then be way more console friendly, stuff like significantly dumbed down character system (DA->DA2) or even just 4-8 skills because a controller can't handle more (DA2->DAI, ME->ME2). Yes a very slippery slope.

 

[zapotec]

Almost finished the game, the management part was really boring for me, even at normal kingdom difficulty.

By skimming through the adventure path books, it seems that Owlcat overcomplicated the events phase (it's actually a minor thing, 25% to have one event in a month) and reduced to a minimum the rest (no edicts, dumbed down expansion).
If the events were less and they were handled like the "king of dragon pass" ones, it would be much more fun

 

[Grunker]

VentilatorOfDoom yes it's obviously a cashgrab that's gonna play pretty terribly. But at the expense of console players.

And no it's not a slippery slope - DA already wore marks of consilitis (even though I liked the game) and it seemed obvious the company was headed in that direction - ME proved it. And ME->ME2??? ME was a console release, it didn't even receive a PC port until after a long time.

Meanwhile companies like GGG profit off of the console release and seem to have no plans to water down their game because of it, it's just another source of income for them. In fact the game's growth has just meant a better PC product. If someone wants to play Path of Exile on their console let them, I don't give a shit. Just like I don't give a shit that the Chinese version of the game is crap with all sorts of evil MTX schemes, because the base game caters to an audience that wouldn't accept that, and GGG knows it.

If Owlcat wants to develop for console primarily they can already do that. Profiting off of a PC game on the console doesn't really relate to that.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

VentilatorOfDoom yes it's obviously a cashgrab that's gonna play pretty terribly. But at the expense of console players.

And no it's not a slippery slope - DA already wore marks of consilitis (even though I liked the game) and it seemed obvious the company was headed in that direction - ME proved it. And ME->ME2??? ME was a console release, it didn't even receive a PC port until after a long time.

Meanwhile companies like GGG profit off of the console release and seem to have no plans to water down their game because of it, it's just another source of income for them. In fact the game's growth has just meant a better PC product. If someone wants to play Path of Exile on their console let them, I don't give a shit. Just like I don't give a shit that the Chinese version of the game is crap with all sorts of evil MTX schemes, because the base game caters to an audience that wouldn't accept that, and GGG knows it.

If Owlcat wants to develop for console primarily they can already do that. Profiting off of a PC game on the console doesn't really relate to that.

I know ME was a console release, I meant they further reduced the number of active skills, like they did with DA2 and DAI or TW3. The only reason to do that is to cater to people playing with a controller.
Console players will complain about PF:K and those complaints will influence the decision making process of Owlcat - if they decide to continue to develope for consoles, just like it did influence the other companies that went the same way in the past. I don't know GGG or Path of Exile, but if they release for consoles and don't dumb their games down for it, they clearly are the exception.