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

[Wunderbar]

Hey cookiemaker friends do you have any advice for me before i start playing on core?

be sure not to sell an emerald necklace. This thing is required for a sidequest or two, and it's a real PITA to find one.

 

[MiX]

There is a popular list of builds on neoseeker website that are supposed to be viable for Unfair, but some of these guides look completely wrong, or maybe I don't understand this game. For the Dex Scion build, they recommend taking Weapon Finesse level 1, but the recommended weapon is a longsword. Wouldn't that feat be completely useless in that case? Also, for the Blind run Scion build, they took Improved Unarmed Strike level 1, but the build is based on scimitar/longsword. Since there is no respec on Unfair, why would someone waste feats like that?
https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-kingmaker/builds/Main_Character

I don't follow any of these guides, I was just looking for a reference for my own Eldritch Scion, and wanted to make sure I understand the mechanics right. Can anyone confirm if these two builds are wrong? Others don't seem that good either tbh.

Weapon finesse -> Slashing grace means you can use a dex for longsword damage and to hit

Improved unarmed strike is there so you can take Crane style which is a much better version of fight defensively

 

[LannTheStupid]

 

[Sunri]

and people complained about 3 female companions in wrath

 

[Sunri]

Also why killing monsters like trolls and kobolds is evil in pathfinder?

 

[ferratilis]

and people complained about 3 female companions in wrath

What I'm wondering is how you managed to activate that trap when you have Jaethal in the party?! Her base Perception is 10.

 

[Sunri]

and people complained about 3 female companions in wrath

What I'm wondering is how you managed to activate that trap when you have Jaethal in the party?! Her base Perception is 10.

Linzi is retarded and failed her skillcheck

 

[kangaxx]

I have finally finished this game, clocking in at 115h. My thoughts if you are patient enough to read them:

Spoiler

Apparently I've managed to cut out an end dungeon and I have no idea what choices prevented that... and I don't have it in me to go back and redo everything. The ending seemed pretty good so I really don't get that at all.

Fantastic game overall with some serious flaws, but on balance I really enjoyed it:

Good:

• Lots of people online bitching about difficulty... I only found one or two fights to be infuriating, and often it was down to saving throws that I made or the enemy failed when retrying. Difficulty was pitched at the right level for me and infinitely customisable anyway, so I don't get that complaint.
• The game was at its best when adventuring around the map clearing out the 'mini dungeons'. It brought to mind the first time I played original BG as a 13yo, in a good way.
• Timed quests worked well and tied in with the 'managing the fate of a kingdom' thing. I get why people didn't like it, but most games don't have this and on balance I thought it made a nice change. Maybe the devs should have pointed out upfront the high importance of not ignoring the main quest.
• Good and bad, but the game sometimes encourages you to 'take hints' in a way many others don't. A good example is the Lord Smoulderburn humiliation as an early level party (dead people lying all around the beds.. of course don't sleep there), which of course I fell for because I always have to click to see what happens. Bad because the game doesn't do it very often, even though it set this up on your head early. So it feels like a sort of 'broken promise' (i.e. the game will often hint at something, and nothing happens).
• I liked some of the companions, e.g. Nok Nok. I felt especially bad for him being taunted by Nyrissa in the End Murder House, and actually felt relieved when he survived.
• Generally great atmosphere in the dungeons. Maybe they went overboard on the trash encounters, maybe not enough enemy variety or interesting encounter design, but overall I enjoyed them.
• I like the way the game ramps up the sense of urgency at the end, although the gaps between the final couple of chapters are pretty long.

Bad:

• Kingdom building really should have been better explained. I actually came to enjoy it as a side-diversion and quite satisfying once I understood it, but I resorted to looking up tips online for this bit because it was too opaque for something so intrinsic to not losing the game.
• And on that theme, although kingdom management makes for a nice side game it ultimately feels a bit pointless. The teleportation circles and artisan stuff are nice (although, again, not explained at all), but that felt like the main benefit aside from 'keeping the game going'. I wish they'd made more of it because it felt quite unique for this type of game.
• Probably around 5h of the game time was spent just watching the horsey chess piece move around on the map, and camping.. too long really.
• This isn't the game's fault, but I am used to old D&D rules and had no idea about some of the differences in Pathfinder's rules. So I was stuck 2/3 of the way through Vordakai's with no diamond dust and unable to cast Restoration... which I didn't appreciate. Yes it's ultimately my fault, but very annoying.
• I understand the complaints about being punished many, many hours after decisions by losing companions. It didn't happen to me (not ones that I cared about anyway), but it easily could have because I don't think the decisions were all that well signposted.
• That said, Bards seem pretty bullshit in this game, and losing my bard to an unavoidable "LOL GOTCHA" moment just before the hardest dungeon felt cheap. That said I didn't bother replacing her via Anoriel and managed fine anyway.
• Probably a Pathfinder system thing, but I found it weird to have multiple characters with ability scores in the 20s in the first third of the game. This game dishes out magical items like sweets, and it's kind of retarded to be honest. Nok Nok had Dex 30+ by endgame... from my limited CRPG knowledge of D&D that's basically god-tier in that system isn't it?
• The temptation to reload on failed skill checks is just far too high in this game, particularly when high level loot or far better outcomes are gated behind them. It isn't specific to this game, and although it's necessary for TT I don't think it's great design for a CRPG.
• I agree with the complaints about the "trash" encounters in the House at the Edge of Time being irritating for what they are. They aren't difficult in isolation (especially if like me you lucked out and put Blind Fight on your main tank), but you need to burn spells per encounter. This means the dungeon is heavily broken up and becomes a bit of a chore. It will almost single-handedly put me off redoing the game for quite some time.
• Mandragora swarms are bullshit. Literal bullshit when there are 4 stacked on top of each other and there are other enemies in the room. Sorry if this sounds butthurt but they aren't fun to deal with, and they should be deleted from the game.
• Music is a bit annoying with not enough variation, and it got stuck in my head because of the amount of time spent on the kingdom management and travel screen. I ended up playing for many hours with no headphones, in total silence as a result.

Overall a cracking game and really impressive for a first game from that studio. Probably too long, but just about worth the time investment. Now I shall not think of it for many, many years.

On to WOTR!

 

[Sunri]

There are to many kingdom events at once feels overwhelming

 

[kangaxx]

I always did the problems first and only did other events if I had advisors to spare. The game seems to punish you for ignoring or failing problems. Until you unlock more councilors I agree it's not that fun to manage.

 

[Haplo]

Don't lock your advisors on long projects - at least until you know what you're doing. The payoff is usually not that great and anyway these projects can wait.
Meanwhile the advisors are needed to solve daily issues.

 

[Wunderbar]

Me: "finally a peaceful week, I can commit my high priest to do some curse researches"

Gozreh, the god of sky and wind, seems to be angry:

 

[Cryomancer]

Guys, I'm playing on unfair, so I need all power that I can get. Where I can find the crown shards for the The first crown quest? I din't did this quest in any of my runs since it wasen't needed.

 

[Raghar]

There are to many kingdom events at once feels overwhelming

You know, pathfinder has multiple people who can do that long term project. And in normal game that simulates stuff, one of them would do that long term project, other would do shorter projects to be available...

But, games like that were done in era of racism, different species had different rights, sexism, and when developers had fun with designing and creating complex simulations first, profit was just theoretical.

 

[kangaxx]

Guys, I'm playing on unfair, so I need all power that I can get. Where I can find the crown shards for the The first crown quest? I didn't did this quest in any of my runs since it wasen't needed.

To be honest you find them just by doing all the content in the castle of knives... borderline can't miss them.

 

[Cryomancer]

Guys, I'm playing on unfair, so I need all power that I can get. Where I can find the crown shards for the The first crown quest? I didn't did this quest in any of my runs since it wasen't needed.

To be honest you find them just by doing all the content in the castle of knives... borderline can't miss them.

I found. I confused it with the trial questline. This game is just too hard on unfair. I could't kill spawn of rovagug. With his normal attributes, you can just spam plague storm and wait till he fails a save AND take 4 int damage. In unfair, he has 12 INT and only fails on saves on 1, so attribute drain can't work. I even attmpted to have a ludicrous amount of bogeyman summoned so he would have a 1/400 chance of failing on the two saves, but they could't pierce his spell resistance...

 

[kangaxx]

Good luck in the next section chummer.

 

[Daidre]

I found. I confused it with the trial questline. This game is just too hard on unfair. I could't kill spawn of rovagug. With his normal attributes, you can just spam plague storm and wait till he fails a save AND take 4 int damage. In unfair, he has 12 INT and only fails on saves on 1, so attribute drain can't work. I even attmpted to have a ludicrous amount of bogeyman summoned so he would have a 1/400 chance of failing on the two saves, but they could't pierce his spell resistance...

See, this is the place where those "useless" 20 lvl pure Two-Handed Fighters shine. Buff his saves high enough to withstood Spawn's annoying mind-affecting aura (or get direct immunity with items) and he will tear apart this thing in one-two rounds top.

Well, on less snarky note, I had run 40+ different parties through Beyond the Stolen Lands rogue-like mode, mostly on Hard/Unfair, and even with all cool options from the Call of the Wilds mod, my Two-Handed Fighter with x4 15-20 Crits from Fauchard was by far my most powerful and reliable combatant on the lower (60+) levels of the dungeon, where AC climbs higher and higher and all rooms are filled with Autumn/Golden golems, who have charming ability to auto-roll 20s on all of their saves (And a lot more direct immunities on top of floor modifiers).

Only class who could really compare was Kineticist - but with completely deranged gameplay built upon casting Cloud/Deadly Earth/Wall into fog of war.

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like PC Gamer also interviewd Owlcat about Kingmaker: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-long-road-to-the-secret-ending-of-pathfinder-kingmaker/

The long road to the secret ending of Pathfinder: Kingmaker
As if Owlcat Games' CRPG wasn't difficult enough, it has a hidden ending players had to work hard to uncover and harder to earn. Spoilers ahead.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an old-fashioned CRPG based on a tabletop ruleset so complex, even fans call it "Mathfinder." It's a long and complicated game, but apparently not long and complicated enough for Owlcat Games, who hid a secret ending deep within it. Finding out how to unlock that ending took datamining, machine translation, and the cooperation of multiple determined fan communities.

Players first stumbled across the existence of the secret ending while grappling with Kingmaker's many other issues at launch. "I kind of vacuumed up all the scuttlebutt I could from various sources, because this game wasn't taking any prisoners," says Prototype00, one of the players who joined the subreddit and Steam forum in late 2018 to make sense of its opaque rules and brutal encounters. "This was before concessions were made to at least inform new players about things like 'spider swarms will utterly murder you' or 'Not having enough supplies for Vordakai's tomb is basically game over.' You would run into deadly situations all the time."

Before patched-in loading screen tips and a dungeon redesign, a lot of first-time players were murdered by tiny spiders in the beginner dungeon of Fangberry Cave and turned to forums for help. But not everyone was digging into Kingmaker just to find out how to survive the spiders or min-max their way to the most overpowered character.

Some were trying to figure out how to romance its villain: Nyrissa, the Nymph Queen.

Doom and bloom

"We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to have a 'secret', hard to achieve ending to the game," says lead narrative designer Alexander Komzolov, "and that it must be tied to Nyrissa's romance. Our goal was to place hints about it throughout the game, and drop a mega-hint near the finale. We planned that gamers would play the Kingmaker 'normally', attain a regular romance and a regular ending while being constantly 'lured' by the prospect of a 'secret romance ending', to inspire thoughts like 'is it in the game, or is the game messing with me?'"

When you meet Nyrissa she's an ally, pretending to be a simple nature spirit called the Guardian of the Bloom. Over the course of Kingmaker you learn she's behind the troubles blighting your land, sending armies of fey monsters and manipulating other villains into attacking.

But—via one particular sidequest where you win a debate organized by a demigod and then risk squandering your reward by demanding as your prize that the demigod tells you about your true love—you learn this fairytale figure can be redeemed. And, yes, romanced.

Not everyone was tempted. On a Steam forum thread where players theorized about the possibility, one suggested you'd be better off romancing literally any other NPC, since they "don't look like lettuce." A player who was more intrigued by the possibility replied, "She has 36 in charisma so she is a good looking lettuce."

These players figured out what Komzolov called the "secret romance ending" was possible, but they were only just beginning to understand how to get to it.

"It was the game's biggest secret," says Alice Wu, who joined Kingmaker's Discord to talk spoilers, "but there were plenty of clues to its existence. The real puzzle was knowing all of the conditions to succeed." Kingmaker's launch bugginess made these conditions trickier to figure out, however, "since no one was sure if any complication either stemmed from a design decision or a bug."

In the early weeks after Kingmaker's release, getting any ending—let alone a secret ending—was almost impossible. Act 5 might not even end, and parts of a climactic dungeon called The House at the End of Time were so broken players had to teleport past certain areas to avoid their game breaking. If you got there and didn't have the right spell to do that? Too bad.

Several patches later things smoothed out enough for Alice to finish Kingmaker with one of its normal endings. She compiled everything she and other players on Discord had figured out, then posted it on Reddit. In the thread that followed, the communities' combined knowledge of what it would take to unlock the secret ending was brought together.

Some of what they understood was obvious. You had to choose non-aggressive dialogue options when talking to Nyrissa even after her betrayal, for example.

Other steps were less obvious.

Spoiler

Clear a hex, build a keep, become a research wizard

Half of Kingmaker is a game where you go on adventures and fight trolls, "and then you have Kingdom Management, where you do taxes," as Prototype00 jokingly puts it.

The endgame of D&D in its early editions was clearing a hex on the wilderness map, getting rid of all the monsters, and building a keep there. Maybe a stronghold or a wizard's tower. Then you slowly build up a domain and spend the rest of your days dealing with the problems of the local citizens.

Few ever made it to that endgame, but the dream remained part of the collective unconscious of longtime roleplayers: Some day we will clear a hex and build a keep.

Kingmaker is about that dream, and kingdom management is how it simulates the day-to-day running of your land. You assign advisors to deal with events and opportunities as they crop up, and when they're free you dedicate them to long-term projects—making trade deals with neighbours, upgrading roads and infrastructure, training a military, and so on.

You can also assign your religious advisor (the high priest) and your arcane advisor (the magister) to research the curses you repeatedly stumble across in various quests and sidequests. There are a lot of them. A hunter has become a werewolf, a murder victim is doomed to return as a zombie, a dryad transformed into a big evil tree. Each curse requires weeks or even months of research to understand, during which the chosen advisor will be unavailable to deal with disasters or improve your kingdom, leaving the land in a weakened position.

"You're going to put your Kingdom underwater if you try to do this from the outset," Prototype00 says.

Standard advice was not to bother with most research, that it was one of Kingmaker's many "noob traps" for new players to fall into. "People were right in that you could safely ignore most of them—from the standpoint of a normal playthrough," says Alice. "Yet it turns out they're actually one of the main requirements for the romance."

There are 16 curses and to get the secret ending you need to have researched 13 of them, though it doesn't matter which 13, as discovered by a Russian player named FreeSergey. While the English-language Kingmaker community was struggling through bugged 100-hour playthroughs to figure it out, FreeSergey simply datamined the information. He even wrote a guide explaining not only how to get to the secret ending, but how to track variables in the player.json file to make sure you hadn't goofed along the way.

The thing is, he wrote it in Russian.

"Even though it was out there, nobody had translated it," says Prototype00, "so if you wanted to know what it said, you had to machine translate it yourself." Which he did, sentence by sentence. "I gave it a once-over and minorly adjusted some sentences for readability and then posted it on Reddit. You can go through the Reddit thread and compare it to the Steam guide and you'll see some places where I left some hilariously ill-translated stuff in there. To the guide's and FreeSergey's credit, it's written in a clear and comprehensive fashion, so even with my many mistakes, the meaning he meant to convey shines through."

Knowledge (Endings) skill check passed

FreeSergey's datamining didn't just confirm the necessity of curse research. It also confirmed that you had to have specific conversations with end-of-chapter bosses, who are each under a curse of their own. You had to either talk to a kobold chief, which was only possible if you killed his ally the king of the trolls first and then passed an Intimidate check, or talk to a barbarian king who was slowly being taken over by a cursed sword, which was only possible if you complete the quest within one of Kingmaker's many hidden time limits.

Manage that, and you then had to get a specific dialogue with an undead cyclops that only triggered if you passed a hidden skill check while talking to him.

"You would not even know if you failed unless you checked your log and scrolled all the way up to where those hidden checks would have happened after the fact," says Alice, who calls this "by far the hardest step."

Somehow there's more. As Redditor u/charlesatan noticed, you needed to bring a certain companion with you to a dungeon, then talk him into destroying an artifact you find there. The chain of events that sets off makes it possible to obtain a different artifact, a sword of thorns called the Briar, which becomes essential later. It's absurdly specific.

With all that in your pocket—the Briar, a knowledge of curses gained from research projects and triggering specific dialogues with bosses, and having said the right things while talking to Nyrissa—it's possible to make it to the secret ending. As long as you never tried to romance any other NPCs along the way or idly suggested abdicating your throne in one conversation with Nyrissa, which will lock you out completely.

Following FreeSergey's guide, Prototype00 got there on his first try. Having confirmed the guide's information was correct, he revised it with his own screenshots and corrected text from English dialogue choices in place of the machine-translated ones and put it on Steam, where it's now helped hundreds of players.

I followed the guide on my own second playthrough, and made it to the hidden ending in a breezy 126 hours.

Toward Kingmaker's climax it's revealed that Nyrissa herself is the subject of a curse. In the distant past, a trickster demigod of the fey lands called the Lantern King stole her emotions and empathy, made the Briar out of them, and hid it from her. In the tabletop version of Kingmaker, the Briar is a thorny vorpal sword, a weapon players can use to defeat Nyrissa. Her death is described in the text as "an unfortunate beheading from a sword forged of her own capacity to love."

The videogame is more sympathetic, revealing that the Lantern King forced her to fill a magical cup called "the Apology" with grains of sand, each formed from a kingdom she destroys. Your kingdom will be the thousandth grain in this cup. If you choose to return the Briar to Nyrissa rather than chop off her head with it, you return her soul and empathy, making her realize what she's done.

That's not enough to free her, however. You have to combine that decision with your degree in Advanced Curse Knowledge from the University of Kingdom Management and Hidden Skill Checks to convince Nyrissa there's a way to turn the curse back on its creator. While the videogame version of Kingmaker does away with hexes on its map, it's still a game about clearing a hex and building a keep—only it's a "hex" in the other meaning of the word.

Following this branch to its conclusion makes an optional multi-stage final boss fight against the Lantern King mandatory, piling on yet another layer of difficulty. An absurd fairytale happy ending follows, but by god you have to earn it.

The thing is, like everything about Kingmaker, from the spider swarms of Fangberry Cave to the intricacies of the kingdom management system, its creators genuinely don't seem to realize how hard they made it to achieve. "We expected the secret ending to be rather easy to reach when you know where to look for it," Alexander Komzolov told me. Rather easy, he says. I don't want to know what a harder version would have looked like.

 

[Sarathiour]

I don't know why they keep saying the same bullshit, without even checking if it is right :

Spoiler

Somehow there's more. As Redditor u/charlesatan noticed, you needed to bring a certain companion with you to a dungeon, then talk him into destroying an artifact you find there. The chain of events that sets off makes it possible to obtain a different artifact, a sword of thorns called the Briar, which becomes essential later. It's absurdly specific.

No you don't need to do it you fucking dunce. Bringing Tristan to mordekai's tomb, which is by the way HEAVELY emphasized, only make finding the briar way easier, because irrovetti will keep and the check to find it in his palace is easier. If you don't, Nyrissa find it before you and hide it in the house at the end of time, where the skill check is way more difficult, but still entirely possible if you know where to look for it.

 

[Sunri]

This spell is busted af just cast this and auto win every fight i need to play wrath with mage also i made chaotic evil character and just shifted to neutral this game wasn't made for evil playthrough

 

[Cryomancer]

This spell is busted af just cast this and auto win every fight i need to play wrath with mage also i made chaotic evil character and just shifted to neutral this game wasn't made for evil playthrough

Lich's domain of the hungry flesh is a ultra buffed version of this spell with attribute damage. In kingmaker, I only din't had this spell in my spellbook when I was fighting monsters with spell immunity. Acid Fog woks amazingly well against then.

 

[Sunri]

This spell is busted af just cast this and auto win every fight i need to play wrath with mage also i made chaotic evil character and just shifted to neutral this game wasn't made for evil playthrough

Lich's domain of the hungry flesh is a ultra buffed version of this spell with attribute damage. In kingmaker, I only din't had this spell in my spellbook when I was fighting monsters with spell immunity. Acid Fog woks amazingly well against then.

I'm not sure if i want to play lich i know this is proprably best option for caster but it just feel weird being a disciple/slave to a guy that can be killed with lv1 spell

 

[LannTheStupid]

i made chaotic evil character and just shifted to neutral this game wasn't made for evil playthrough

This is a very strange observation. I would say that the game is very good for a Chaotic Evil character; though, the Kingdom Management works better for Lawful Evil (which is understandable). Maybe you were too hesitant to kill?

 

[Sunri]

i made chaotic evil character and just shifted to neutral this game wasn't made for evil playthrough

This is a very strange observation. I would say that the game is very good for a Chaotic Evil character; though, the Kingdom Management works better for Lawful Evil (which is understandable). Maybe you were too hesitant to kill?

Is being chaotic evil character is all about killing random mofos without reason?