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

[Trashos]

What level?

10 currently.

Then what you need is Taking 10.

May be it can be implemented as a mod.

That is a cute solution, indeed.

 

[Trashos]

The tools are there to blow out every check by lvl 8 at the latest, but I guess a normal distribution would be more realistic.

No, definitely not. Many checks yes, all checks no.

 

[Desiderius]

The tools are there to blow out every check by lvl 8 at the latest, but I guess a normal distribution would be more realistic.

No, definitely not. Many checks yes, all checks no.

All checks. Learn the categories.

 

[Trashos]

Desiderius, yes I know the categories, and I have at least 1 part member devoted to each. Not always ideal, but at least reasonable.

Touch of Law is what I asked for, but is it available to companions? (If we have to build the party around acquiring Touch of Law, then it is not a very elegant solution -it should be easily available to most parties).

 

[LannTheStupid]

Archeologists get it for Trickery at 6.

Is Clever Explorer implemented in the game?

Hm. May be Valerie as an Archeologist could be pretty good. Even from her story pespective - when a fallen paladin jumps into bed with the Baron, it is not very Paladiny/Fightery...

 

[Desiderius]

That IS cheating.

Avoiding the crit is one thing. Far fewer ways to do that. All kind of ways in game to pass every check, with very few even close to being necessary.

 

[Desiderius]

No, the categories are Sacred, Morale, Competence, Insight, Luck, etc.

 

[Desiderius]

Desiderius, yes I know the categories, and I have at least 1 part member devoted to each. Not always ideal, but at least reasonable.

Touch of Law is what I asked for, but is it available to companions? (If we have to build the party around acquiring Touch of Law, then it is not a very elegant solution -it should be easily available to most parties).

First level domain ability. So Ekun can get it via Sacred Huntmaster levels on way to picking up Hunter’s Tactics (share Teamwork Feats with Pet, like Outflank and Shake it Off) at SH3.

 

[Trashos]

First level domain ability. So Ekun can get it via Sacred Huntmaster levels on way to picking up Hunter’s Tactics (share Teamwork Feats with Pet, like Outflank and Shake it Off) at SH3.

Do Sacred Huntsmaster lvls stunt Okbo's growth?

 

[Desiderius]

Pet class.

 

[Trashos]

OK, so that's a solution I guess. Not ideal, I wish that all Clerics had it (and of course it wouldn't be in the Law domain, and it wouldn't be called Touch of Law, and it doesn't make much sense to use the Law domain when using Trickery, eg).

 

[Gay-Lussac]

Okay, i started my TB run now. Ranger, Stormwalker because I am too lazy to micro manage pets. I know he is weaker than normal ranger.

Currently fighting through the tutorial, and its quite ardous. I take probably 5 tries per encounter, with the odd encounter here and there where my dudes just oneshot the entire enemy group.
I had a rtwp cleric crusader ages ago, with whom I played unfair aswell. Played roughly until the point where you can challenge the swarms in that one sidequest I think. Difficulty is about the same.

Is there something I am doing terribly wrong? I hit on a 12 with my MC and other good characters, my dudes get hit on an 8 or 10 or something. Due to double damages my party gets blown up as soon as dazes don't stick.
Also does the game get significantly easier on Unfair after 3 hours or so? On the cleric the game got a lot easier with a full custom team, but It was still a tad too annoying to continue on rtwp.

I will probably take the difficulty down to hard otherwise.
My run where I got far into the game was challenging, and that was smooth sailing most of the time, until I got like three different major quest breaking bugs at once. This game on release really was something else.

I finished my vanilla playthrough on unfair. 5 man party of Jubilost, Linzi, Valerie, Ekun and my MC Thug (1) / Scaled Fist (5) / Dragon Disciple (10) / Sorcerer (4). My MC had such a stupid intimidate save due to monstruous STR and CHA that any enemy without immunity to frightening would just run for the hills (more annoying than its worth, to be honest). Ekun is a beast, pet scaling is downright retarded in the base game (more AC than my Valerie in full gear and with a ton of AC feats, ok), bard is great, Alchemist utility is broken (specially with a pet).

My main takeaway is that Unfair is just unfun. It's obviously doable and to a certain extent you can even outpace the difficulty at around the time you have to deal with the Cyclops arc, but it's generally simply not worth it. I get it, I'm a glutton for punishment too. I like beating the game at its hardest, but here that equates to a reload fest with little tactical input. Sure, you need to find an optimal strategy to deal with an encounter, but once you do that its usually still not enough without the help of the dice, specially early on. Making a full party of muchkined custom characters might ease the early pain a bit, but I never like doing that in these games.

I'm having way way more fun on my Last Azlanti turn-based mode playthrough on challenging with Holic's mods (Call of the Wild, Proper Flanking, Favored Class and Improved AI). Everything is way more exciting when you have to play every battle to the death and any battle can be your last one. Random encounters and rest ambushes are SCARY sometimes. Got a dragon level encounter with 2 ancient fire elementals against my lvl 6-7 party and it was wild! Thought I was a gonner there for sure and surprisingly came out on top.

If you intend to stick to unfair, I found a bard with Greater Spell Focus: Enchantment to be borderline necessary in the early game. Fascinate and Cacophonous Call will completely disable almost all of the early game enemies up until the Cyclops invasion, thus helping a lot with your tanking problem. But this will still depend on lucky dice rolls because enemies in Unfair have really inflated saves, so I'll reiterate my advice to ditch Unfair altogether. There's really no need to put yourself through it.

 

[The_Mask]

My main takeaway is that Unfair is just unfun. It's obviously doable and to a certain extent you can even outpace the difficulty at around the time you have to deal with the Cyclops arc, but it's generally simply not worth it. I get it, I'm a glutton for punishment too. I like beating the game at its hardest, but here that equates to a reload fest with little tactical input. Sure, you need to find an optimal strategy to deal with an encounter, but once you do that its usually still not enough without the help of the dice, specially early on. Making a full party of muchkined custom characters might ease the early pain a bit, but I never like doing that in these games.

I don't agree that it is unfun, but it is definitely not as fun as the difficulty 1 step below. I like to be punished for being silly as much as the next person, but most of the game has this semi-sadistic game design anyway, so...

 

[Desiderius]

OK, so that's a solution I guess. Not ideal, I wish that all Clerics had it (and of course it wouldn't be in the Law domain, and it wouldn't be called Touch of Law, and it doesn't make much sense to use the Law domain when using Trickery, eg).

Then you’d just blow out everything without having to work at it and get bored. As it is if you play tight you can win them all without it or you can pay a small price for the convenience.

Seems like a sweet spot.

 

[Desiderius]

My main takeaway is that Unfair is just unfun. It's obviously doable and to a certain extent you can even outpace the difficulty at around the time you have to deal with the Cyclops arc, but it's generally simply not worth it. I get it, I'm a glutton for punishment too. I like beating the game at its hardest, but here that equates to a reload fest with little tactical input. Sure, you need to find an optimal strategy to deal with an encounter, but once you do that its usually still not enough without the help of the dice, specially early on. Making a full party of muchkined custom characters might ease the early pain a bit, but I never like doing that in these games.

I don't agree that it is unfun, but it is definitely not as fun as the difficulty 1 step below. I like to be punished for being silly as much as the next person, but most of the game has this semi-sadistic game design anyway, so...

Nothing after lvl four is even semi-sadistic and they cut out most of the stuff before that.

I’m to the point where I’m coasting now on Unfair without reloads but admittedly it took a long time to get there and requires a certain core party make-up.

Hard is the ideal difficulty for experienced players, with challenging for chapter one.

 

[Whisper]

Archeologists (and Barbs) get Uncanny Dodge at lvl 2.

Whisper is right about Hargulka (and no reason to take Val there anyway) but there are only a few mobs like that. Enraged Owlbears, Bokken, etc. Tanking those is a waste but if you play tight all your melee should be hard to hit for everything else, including Gobs.

There’s even a couple helms that give you a bonus vs gobs.

The extra 10AC he’s talking about is a waste by midgame because it does nothing for the real issue - nat 20s.

Regular Cyclops shouldn’t even be a problem (although their actual 20/20 crits can really hurt), it’s the 3 or 4 Greaters that need extra attention. Tank with Image/Displacement and focus fire on those. Blind helps a lot.

You will feel having 10 AC less before mid-game, for sure )

 

[Whisper]

I’m to the point where I’m coasting now on Unfair without reloads but admittedly it took a long time to get there and requires a certain core party make-up.

It is possible to do Unfair run without any reloads? I dont think so.

 

[Whisper]

From steam review (not mine), recent one.

"And now, I will start with the biggest, worst problem- the game cheats. Can I prove this? No, I suppose I can't, and I'm sure Owlcat games will be quick to say the game doesn't, but picture this- you're at the broken watchtower and you know there's a group of bandits waiting to jump you. You forgot to prepare glitter dust, but that's okay- you spread out a little and move Valerie out front to draw aggro, and the combat begins- two bandits south, they're dealt with by your paladin and Amiri while the west bandits come forward to attack Valerie. It's all good and there's only one bandit left- that's where the BS begins. For two rounds, no one in my party could get a roll above a 5, and that's not all- the bandit critically hit Valerie, who had an AC of ~30. This makes no sense to me, as that should be statistically improbable, yet there it was, 20 to hit and 20 to confirm. It was fine, next round he went down, and I went south to deal with the troll group- another double 20 hit on Valerie. In all fairness, the troll did have a better than 5% chance to hit, but the issue was a double 20 within not even 10 minute of one another. That's 1/160000 of a chance, and enemies rolling double 20s has happened at least four times to me. Not fun."

 

[LannTheStupid]

I will start with the biggest, worst problem- the game cheats.

This is another example of cognitive inability of Homo sapiens sapiens to understand randomness and probablitiy. Somewhere on reddit there is a post where the author wrote down all the rolls during several hours of Kingmaker and then calculated probabilities. They were as a D20 should produce. Actually, you can do it yourself, but you need a sample that is large enough.

Offtopic: this is the main reason why election fraud by tampering final or intermediate numbers is so much worse than other methods, like adding bulletins. Humans produce spikes on tens and half-tens, avoid "long" sequences of the same numbers and in general skew any random distribution.

 

[Whisper]

Can you post link to this reddit post?

 

[Desiderius]

Archeologists (and Barbs) get Uncanny Dodge at lvl 2.

Whisper is right about Hargulka (and no reason to take Val there anyway) but there are only a few mobs like that. Enraged Owlbears, Bokken, etc. Tanking those is a waste but if you play tight all your melee should be hard to hit for everything else, including Gobs.

There’s even a couple helms that give you a bonus vs gobs.

The extra 10AC he’s talking about is a waste by midgame because it does nothing for the real issue - nat 20s.

Regular Cyclops shouldn’t even be a problem (although their actual 20/20 crits can really hurt), it’s the 3 or 4 Greaters that need extra attention. Tank with Image/Displacement and focus fire on those. Blind helps a lot.

You will feel having 10 AC less before mid-game, for sure )

No, all my Val builds were fine by the time I picked her up again after Trobold. Only time I took her there was before playing Unfair.

She either has Mirror Image or something else to help (TSS and Kinetic Knight both have additional protection). I had her on Oracle with Nature Mystery for pet on CotW and she wasn’t as hard to hit there yet.

 

[Desiderius]

I’m to the point where I’m coasting now on Unfair without reloads but admittedly it took a long time to get there and requires a certain core party make-up.

It is possible to do Unfair run without any reloads? I dont think so.

Not ch 1 that’s almost certain, although some pro speed runners could probably game it. By midgame with a full party sure.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Apparently, I was too generous in my expectations of humanity.

This is the thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9r88d6/rng_is_set_a_bit_low/
This is the post with (alas) only 370 rolls and a histogram: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9r88d6/rng_is_set_a_bit_low/ecgitit/
This is some useful reading: Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities.

P.S.: it seems Google has joined the sanctions and banned vatniks from its services.

 

[Desiderius]

Apparently, I was too generous in my expectations of humanity.

This is the thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9r88d6/rng_is_set_a_bit_low/
This is the post with (alas) only 370 rolls and a histogram: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9r88d6/rng_is_set_a_bit_low/ecgitit/
This is some useful reading: Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities.

P.S.: it seems Google has joined the sanctions and banned vatniks from its services.

Vatniks make the world go round, baizou.

 

[RK47]

Too much trash combat in this game.
Just can't stand prolonged dungeons with 80% uninteresting combat.
Had to take long breaks in between.
Why do they have to do it this way?