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So, Darklands

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
It's been a long, long time since I last touched it. It's aged a bit, the controls need a bit of getting used to after all these years, but is still playable,fuck me, enjoyable even.
What's important, it's challenging, and for the time when it was released it was quite advanced.

So I'm thinking, what's your strategies? How do you create your party, where do you earn your first buck, where do you learn skills.

So far, I have two strategies for the beginning, one is blatant cheating faggoty, the other is a bit more balanced, but requires a bit too much grinding.

First is the obvious: create 4x old fart master alchemists, sell their crap for over 4K, then replace them with the real team. This is faggotry, although in practice isn't that broken. Mostly it just saves time.

The starting guys, I've decided to skimp on actual fighting skills here, and focus on other things that are less easily trained. Good Endurance and Strength is important for all, Str. should be a bit higher.


Guy 1: rural commons family Will be a 25y.o. monk/hermit for good Virtue and Religion. Should know 3-4 saints in the beginning and with max Str and End will be the main battle tank.
I tend to make him the healer with an appropriate skill of 20 or more.

Guy 2: rural common family again. Will be a 25y.o hunter for good Wilderness Lore and a neat bow skill. Will have high Str & End and highest Perception in the group. Also a backup tank.

Guy 3: Wommon, urban craftsmen. Will do the talking&shopping for the party, 25-30 y.o. mainly a craftsman for good Artifice, Streetwise, SpeakCommon. Max Charisma here.

Guy 4: Urban commons, the alchemist in the party. Maxed intelligence, 30-35 y.o.
Will be a student then follow the Alchemist profession to max alchemy. If possible, I pick a recruit "level" along the way to boost Str&End if it gets too low.

As seen, all guys should handle fairly well in a fight. At first, I sell all the potions Guy 4 has to buy half-decent armor for guy 1 and a bow for guy 2 if needed. The rest gets whatever is left, and a pair of javelins for start.

Then comes the boring grind part, I train the chosen figthing skills to acceptable (30-40) levels on city thugs, if possible I try to train Speak Common by fast talking through the encounter. I sell all the not-so phat lewt to upgrade gear.

Once I get confident, time to beat up some city guards getting in the way rather than pay fines sheepishly. I fight my way to the city gates and gtfo for another city, screw over some raubritters on the way.

Your thoughts, gents? I know this is still early game.
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Don't bother researching for min-maxery; you'll sadly find many broken strategies on your own.

For the sake of non-frustration, keep notes on your quests and don't bother being too aggressive about doing the non- robber knight ones, just do them while you happen to be passing through the correct area, because the rewards suck badly and you're doing them just to see the content.

Don't buff a guy with multiple saints (or other sources of stat buffs) at the same time. There is a bug where stacking buffs on the same stat can permanently lower them. If it happens anyway use a character editor or something to fix it.

The sunburst potion works by stunning anyone that can see the spot where it explodes, and it doesn't stun your own guys. It's by far the most powerful combat potion.

If you must, the most important broken things are:
You can use healing-type potions from inventory during battle, which means everyone has infinite HP. So, don't do that if you don't want to engay the shit out of everything.

Anyone with a Religion over 30 gets a point of virtue from a substantial tithe at a church, substantial being something like 3 florins or more.

You get massive rewards from Robber Baron quests given by town mayors, particularly from large towns, like 40 florins a whack. You can even guarantee an audience with saints.

Between those last two you can easily give everyone 90+ virtue, which lets you fire off the best saints, which can do stuff like buff the hell out of someone's alchemy, which in turn allows you to be gay with potions.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
Joined
Dec 12, 2002
Messages
29,683
Location
About 8 meters beneath sea level.
Sounds like a perfectly acceptable build for this game. You covered all the mayor skills and combat indeed comes quickly enough once you go past butchering small time thugs.

One of the many things I enjoyed was how all weapons and armors had their uses. Especially how light armor really was a valid choice in terms of weight and agility. Wonderfull system here and even the real-time combat was deep and interesting. Shame they never released those expansions they hinted on or made a sequel.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
Shame indeed. This game would only needs three things: a slight interface tweak (including visible weapon stats), a graphics update, a bit more varied stuff to do, and it's good to go. Maybe some balancing to the more broken bits.
Would be waay better than current AAA titles.
(I remember being genuinely impressed with the gradual season changes. Even though it looked a bit like a serious gfx glitch at first glance (-:

Yeah, I know this build is okay, I am just thinking about making it less tedious in the beginning. As I get older the less time I have for mindless grinding just to get to the juice.

@ Zomg, yeah, I already noticed that alchemy can break the game quite easily. Was going to restrict myself on this a bit.
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Turn the difficulty up to expert to speed up the game - it makes your stats grow faster. All the encounters are scaled to your stats, so the idea with expert is that you'll be forced into the tougher encounters before you've built up as much gear, alchemy and saints. I've found that you don't really need to grind combat if you make solid 30/35 year old characters, although you do end up doing stuff like repetitively training that's even more dull.
 

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