Merchants will go from village to village as if engaged in trade.
Are you sure they are not engaged in trade? Maybe if you kill them all some goods will stop being available in some places?
Soldiers will move up and down roads from one fortification to the next, while staying inside the territory of their liege lord, giving the appearance that they are on patrol.
How do you know they are aren't actually on patrol? (Or is this just some odd use of language? Like saying "you chained a bunch of words together, giving the appearance that you wrote a re-preview".)
All of your characters will level up with enough experience, but only the player character can choose his or her own skills.
How do you know the NPCs aren't choosing their own skills? (To say they are or are not would seem to be splitting hairs about the meaning of the internal structure of the game's program.)
And do you really mean that the PC chooses their own skills? Or do you mean that the player chooses the PC's skills?
Some of these skills can directly help on the battlefield, while others are useful in other ways, such as reducing daily expenditures or enabling troops to fight better.
So enabling troops to fight better does
not directly help on the battlefield?
The NPCs, however, lack this range of options and must simply choose a professional path with predefined skills.
So the NPCs
do choose their professional path, but do
not choose their skills? Or maybe you meant the player chooses the NPCs professional path? (But then, if the player is making choices for them they're not really NPCs. More like "secondary PCs" or "units".)
No amount of daily revenue will truly be able to feed your army's increasing appetite.
This statement is a bit misleading/confusing as it (and its immediate context) is worded as if other sources of funds don't exist in the game.
Alexander Dergay said:
enemies have their own tasks, they grow in experience
I'm curious about that. Do they just get automatic XP over time, or are they getting XP by the same set of rules as the PC does? (I'm guessing it's the former - or essentially the former. The latter would likely have a tendency of cleaning out the game world. Though I'm all for it working as the latter - it's just harder to create a game world where that can work out as desired. Unless, I guess, if those "tasks" give them XP, and those tasks aren't available to the PC due to "story reasons".)
Alexander Dergay said:
I personally think scaling the enemies is almost cheating
Playing by a different set of rules for no game-world reason
is de facto cheating. (So is NPCs getting XP by some rule that doesn't apply to the PC, "just because".) Of course, NPCs/AI cheating is basically a staple of many games (and many of them would be worse off without it), so just because it's cheating doesn't automatically mean it's net/net bad. Scaling enemies isn't bad because it's cheating, it's bad because it ruins the gameplay (by negating character progression - not that character progression is strictly necessary, but sort of having it but not really because it is negated is just messed up).
There is a scenario in the game right now called Cursed Castle - this is more sandbox, little story, just a few side quests and rumors and lots of combat and castles to conquer.
I like that time matters in the game, and this makes it sound like this game will have replay value more like a strategy game than a typical RPG (which is a good thing in my opinion). Now we just need a DRM-free release and a proper (finished game) review. (And you should have the DRM-free version available for direct purchase if feasible. Ever since GOG's EULA was changed to allow GOG to modify the license terms that apply to you to whatever they {or whoever buys them out} wants, even long
after you've made your purchase and downloaded your game, I am now buying direct from devs whenever I can.)
