KickStarter Solasta: Crown of the Magister Thread - now with Palace of Ice sequel DLC

[Grunker]

Does the selection update at some point? The Forge merchants had a very limited selection when I checked them, there wasn't a single primed double-handed melee weapon.

I just loaded an old save (my current party is slogging through the final dungeon) and I had the two Forge merchants mixed up. The swamp guy only had a primed morningstar; the Verdant Valley guy had the following primed weapons:

-Dagger
-Shortsword
-Longsword
-Spear
-Warhammer
-Xbow
-Heavy Xbow
-Rapier
-Morningstar
-Longbow
-Scimitar
-Greatsword


So exactly one primed two-handed weapon and not much use if you want to make that fancy maul. I have found several primed mauls in both playthroughs buy that may just be Sod's law since all my people are sword and board.

My Forge guy in Lost Valley swamp has a Primed Maul. Too bad my team doesn't have someone using two-handed weapons since that's the only improvement over simple +1 weapons I have found a recipe for.

In general I applaud them moving away from the terribly designed magic weapons of Crown (your team dealt WAY too much damage because of those broken weapons), but replacing that bonkers selection with nothing but boring ass +1 weapons is just replacing one problem with its opposite.

 

[RegionalHobo]

is this worth buying?

if kingmaker is a 8.5 how much would you give to this?

 

[NJClaw]

is this worth buying?

if kingmaker is a 8.5 how much would you give to this?

Solasta is a weird game to recommend. It is severely lacking in almost every area (story, exploration, quests, visuals, sounds, and, above all, encounter design), but its implementation of the 5E system is flawless and combat flows really well.

If you enjoyed Kingmaker for its buildporn, NPCs, and increasingly epic plot, you will find nothing like that in this game. You only get a couple choices in building each character (apart from spells selection), NPCs range from inoffensive to enjoyable only through irony, and the story is just a bland excuse to move to the next fight.

That said, the sense of embarking on a traditional D&D adventure is there, the party banter can be fun at times, and the slick combat system elevates this game to a real gem imho.

 

[Grunker]

is this worth buying?

if kingmaker is a 8.5 how much would you give to this?

It's a better Temple of Elemental Evil with worse (hopw reur ne) graphics. The 5E implementation is spotless, the UI is butt-ugly but incredibly efficient and everything systems-wise is a cRPG dream - from language checks to passive Insight rolls in addition to the obvious combat benefits of Reactions and everything. It has layered level-design with spider crawl-spells allowing you to walk up pillars, or fly enabling you to reach different map levels or rain fire down from above, and a robust crafting system leagues better than most similar RPG-systems. Though the systems content they didn't rip from the SRD is of varying quality (some class archetypes are boring trash, some are fantastic designs, most are mediocre and reek of homebrew), they're still functional and fun.

Content-wise it is mostly utterly trash, with too little encounter design, no worthwhile story, copy-pasted, basic enemies and problematic itemization (a few items are creative and great, but weapons are vastly overpowered).

As such, I can only ascribe to NJClaw 's "weird to recommend"-status. It is near-perfect in terms of systems design and usability, but extremely bare bones in terms of implementation. I found that the last bit was too much of a downside for myself to enjoy it for more than the first few levels, something I'm now rediscovering with the DLC: it's fun at first, but there's simply too little focus on content here to keep your attention.

The biggest problem of the game is that it is way too easy, even on Cataclysm difficulty which boosts your enemies.

 

[Alienman]

is this worth buying?

if kingmaker is a 8.5 how much would you give to this?

Solasta is a weird game to recommend. It is severely lacking in almost every area (story, exploration, quests, visuals, sounds, and, above all, encounter design), but its implementation of the 5E system is flawless and combat flows really well.

If you enjoyed Kingmaker for its buildporn, NPCs, and increasingly epic plot, you will find nothing like that in this game. You only get a couple choices in building each character (apart from spells selection), NPCs range from inoffensive to enjoyable only through irony, and the story is just a bland excuse to move to the next fight.

That said, the sense of embarking on a traditional D&D adventure is there, the party banter can be fun at times, and the slick combat system elevates this game to a real gem imho.

It's like the main plot never takes off, and then suddenly, you are at the ending. I felt like this in both the main game and expansion.

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah I am firmly in the weird to recommend camp also

 

[Acrux]

Wait for a big sale. Skip the campaigns. Play the best community mods.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

I do agree that the DLC is better than OC. The faction quests actually affect more than just the stores, for one.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Does the selection update at some point? The Forge merchants had a very limited selection when I checked them, there wasn't a single primed double-handed melee weapon.

I just loaded an old save (my current party is slogging through the final dungeon) and I had the two Forge merchants mixed up. The swamp guy only had a primed morningstar; the Verdant Valley guy had the following primed weapons:

-Dagger
-Shortsword
-Longsword
-Spear
-Warhammer
-Xbow
-Heavy Xbow
-Rapier
-Morningstar
-Longbow
-Scimitar
-Greatsword


So exactly one primed two-handed weapon and not much use if you want to make that fancy maul. I have found several primed mauls in both playthroughs buy that may just be Sod's law since all my people are sword and board.

Thank you for posting the list. He has the same items in my game. I missed them all when I browsed the inventory since I thought primed items are marked with an icon and get listed in the crafting section. It was my own mistake although making them stand out a bit wouldn't hurt.

 

[Grunker]

I do agree that the DLC is better than OC. The faction quests actually affect more than just the stores, for one.

A valiant effort but ultimately futile because it is broken. Triggers overlap so if you go about the game with the freedom implied, you'll more than likely break a lot of things. For example, you'll get a quest from The Mask to fly their banner from a bandit outpost, which is actually a Rebellion outpost. So the point here is that it's a crossroad for The Mask/Rebellion conflict. However, if you pursue The People's questline for long enought, you'll get a quest to free a prisoner in the same outpost, and the rebel soldiers will be replaced by Dominion.

Hey cool, that's just a reactive world, right? Wrong. It's just one trigger supplanting the other - if you kill that outpost and go back to the Mask, you'll even comment on there being Rebellion soldiers there (which there wasn't - there was Dominion soldiers due to the overlapping triggers).

The Dominion prisoner can be released without reputation loss by using guile, but The Mask quest requires you to kill everyone. And so if you end up in this situation, a quest that should make Rebellion hostile makes Dominion hostile instead (which can have massive complications if you're riding the fairly compatible Mask/Forge/Dominion alliance or even worse if you're planning to go full Dominion).

There are multiple of these instances where the game doesn't intend for alliances to break but due to the shoddy implementation of triggers and limited quest areas, you'll probably end up having to eat it.

You can also play some faction lines to a point where you're doing something completely innocent which won't break alliances, but then the game is coded so that when you return the quest *you automatically and without warning change the game state so you can't avoid fucking up a prior alliance even though you done nothing to anger that faction.* An example is returning to Caer Hydris (or whatever the city is called) after doing a nothing quest for the People, after which an automatic trigger tosses you into the game state where the cleric is arrested. Now, no matter what you do, Dominion will be hostile if you enter vital areas for Dominion progression, because you'll trigger the cleric fight and you'll have no choice but to fight the guards (at a minimum, you should have the choice to help them and turn on The People).

Note that I am not complaining that faction alliances are broken by some actions - this is great and obviously intended. I'm criticizing the stuff that clearly doesn't work as it was supposed to.

In theory, the DLC design is a better fit for Solasta's design, and it certainly has way more interesting ideas than the main game, but in practice, I think it's actually worse than the main game because at least the main game had a lot of unique environs. The DLC's areas are TINY, copy-pasted and the benefits of the "open world" are broken. Even if I think encounter areas are well designed and fun and I really enjoyed just tackling quests in any order.

It's also clear that the resource cost of all these intermingled quest meant less focus on other areas; there are next to no skill checks in the DLC after the initial few hours, for example.

 

[Grunker]

Also it's kind of funny that this game has one of the best animated and skinned Remorhaz' in D&D video game history while characters look like inbred retards

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

It's a better Temple of Elemental Evil

Disagree. To be a better ToEE you need to have better underlying systems and 5ed is kinda shitty. ToEE also had a better dungeon design, way less linear with some C&C.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

DLC main theme: brown female demihuman rebel groups against a cartoonishly evil white male leading a blonde white army.
OC: ancient, evil diety worshipping, human sacrificing, shapeshifting reptilian race from another plane infiltrates and subverts host society.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

The Lost Valley DLC was disappointing. The nonlinearity was pointless as all factions were bland, boring and inconsequential to the end. I hoped they would improve the quests and writing which were already weak in the base campaign but they did not deliver on any of those fronts. The core gameplay is fine but the DLC lacked challenging encounters, interesting locations, memorable characters and quests. I do not recommend it unless you really want more of the same, but even lower in quality than the base game. I have no idea why they chose a setup with so many fractions when they can't handle basic triggers with logical outcomes. They clearly had a certain sequence of events in mind for each faction, perhaps with minimal deviations, and didn't consider alternatives that players could take. Leading to illogical and unsatisfying outcomes. I do not recommend the DLC, at best 1.5/5 points, with the base game at 2.5/5.

 

[Crichton]

I just completed a 2nd playthrough of Lost Valley to take a look at some of what I missed the first time. This time I used a defensive, fireball-heavy party:

Paladin (Oath of the motherland, protection style)
Wizard (Court mage, sellsword)
Wizard (Green mage, sellsword, raise shield)
Cleric (battle, lowlife)

Four characters, all with shields, all with at least medium armor, two with protection style and stacking +AC auras. Made for a pretty nice defensive setup. Under some circumstances opening with 4 x fireball was advantageous, but outside of those, offense was a little dodgy; heavy reliance on smites and spirit guardians. Based on the differences between the two playthroughs, loot appears to be entirely random; I got two cloaks of displacement, a spell mantle, four magical shields, numerous +2 weapons. I did not get a single +str item (gauntlets of ogre power or giant strength belt, I did get one +2 str book).

I have mixed feelings about this approach; on the one hand, it really ties a can around the tail of battle clerics, who are too powerful. On the other hand; I really don't like having important strategic points decided by pure luck (ex. the old 2E spell memorization system, 'you rolled 08 on percentile dice, no fireball for you'). However in fairness the unlimited stat boost items available for purchase in the main campaign are equally retarded. I think a better solution would be limited crafting reagents (i.e. you have one blood diamond, you can use it to make gauntlets of ogre power or a belt of agility). I should also note that going back to the 3E stat-boost system would be a benefit here. In 5E, gauntlets of ogre power are useless to fighters (who already have 20 strength), but they're the breath of life to battle clerics who have two attacks but probably have 14 strength.

Quest stuff:
With foreknowledge, I was able to get almost to the end of all of the questlines for the major rebel groups (Forge, Rebellion, People, Mask) by doing everything in the "right" order. I was even able to advance further in the Dominion questline because I could turn in a mutated dryad head to both the Forge and the Dominion (I had a random encounter with a mutated dryad, so maybe I had two?). I think the writers really missed on some good opportunities to make the different factions more appealing. I ended up going with the people again; I might reload and try Mask just for the hell of it, but Dominion and Rebellion are a bit derp. (Side note: has anyone made a party of four high elves? Does the palace guard still turn up her nose at you?)

The quest design at the end is really kind of fucky; fighting off the Dominion attack on the Rebellion pisses off the Forge for no apparent reason. Doing the final Forge quest is fine with everyone, but turning it in for the reward pisses off the Rebellion. Discovering Marin Ving doesn't seem to impact the ending at all if you restore Orentis-Sirento, which is kind of baffling, because wasn't finding him the whole reason those bigwigs came out here? It's also strange how you can fail forward sometimes; I only handed two of four heads in for the Dominion headhunter quest, but got the next quest in sequence. I escorted the apprentice from that quest to the Forge and still got the next Dominion quest.

 

[notpl]

It's a better Temple of Elemental Evil

Disagree. To be a better ToEE you need to have better underlying systems and 5ed is kinda shitty. ToEE also had a better dungeon design, way less linear with some C&C.

Also, this game literally is not 5e. They could not afford the license. It is a homebrew based off of the public domain 5e OGL. So it is a severely hamstrung version of the worst version of d&d, implemented quite well.

If they hadn't implemented climbing/flying better than any other CRPG to date, I don't think anyone would give a shit about this game. Personally I found it extremely boring.

 

[Artyoan]

My ending to the Lost Valley was one of the biggest buzzkills I've had in years. I had sided with the rebellion though my characters expressed obvious misgivings about it. Yet, when I see the twin guy in the secret facility, my party doesn't get a choice, we just decide to kill him even with the new information that would wildly change the decision making. I prefer the main campaign anyway, even though that had an obviously rushed ending with loose threads everywhere.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

The DLC gives zero explanation why the Forge does react negatively to the decision of helping the rebellion defend itself. Which is particularly irritating since you can help them to form an alliance in a quest before. There is also zero reaction if you decide to kill the rebellion after discovering their leader. The Forge remains upset and their quest canceled. After all of that nonsense I simply went back to town and offed Orentis, took his scepter and left. Which something that I should have done hours before given how weak he and his guards were. It also left me wondering why my group can't crown themselves rulers of the valley, given that we steam-rolled every other wanna-be ruler with ease. Combat also declined towards the end and consisted mostly of fighting normal humans, which was quite dull. The DLC does a poor job at using its bestiary over all and most of the variation is based on random encounters. Its a shame that it does not come in form of properly hand crafted challenges. This DLC has been my biggest disappointment this year, and it really is a pity, since the core gameplay, combat in essence, works well.

 

[NJClaw]

This DLC has been my biggest disappointment this year, and it really is a pity, since the core gameplay, combat in essence, works well.

I can't see it as a disappointment because I like "the core gameplay" so much that I just see anything else as a nice addition, even if it doesn't work properly or it's clearly half-assed.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

This DLC has been my biggest disappointment this year, and it really is a pity, since the core gameplay, combat in essence, works well.

I can't see it as a disappointment because I like "the core gameplay" so much that I just see anything else as a nice addition, even if it doesn't work properly or it's clearly half-assed.

Don't let me detract you. A few comments put the DLC ahead of the base game, which is a view that I do not share. I just wanted to lower the expectations for others, that haven't played the DLC yet. Perhaps other people will be spared some bitterness if they approach the DLC with lower expectations, especially in the quest/story department. I expected that they would deliver some quality content after the rather unsophisticated base campaign, and the DLC certainly does not provide that. Its just strange that they didn't manage to do better after they had everything in place. But enough grief of mine, its time to man up and get to the next game.

 

[Grunker]

This DLC has been my biggest disappointment this year, and it really is a pity, since the core gameplay, combat in essence, works well.

I can't see it as a disappointment because I like "the core gameplay" so much that I just see anything else as a nice addition, even if it doesn't work properly or it's clearly half-assed.

A few comments put the DLC ahead of the base game, which is a view that I do not share.

Very much agree. Better enemies, a few (very few) lessons learned with encounter design, but overall it's the same or even worse than the base game IMO.

It's certainly much worse when it comes to skill use - base campaign isn't great taken as a whole, but it's actually pretty good in the first couple of hours.

 

[rojay]

It's a better Temple of Elemental Evil

Disagree. To be a better ToEE you need to have better underlying systems and 5ed is kinda shitty. ToEE also had a better dungeon design, way less linear with some C&C.

That's what I was going to say.

It's a fine game; the combat is good and they figured out how to reasonably implement the spell "fly." It's turn-based and looks like NWN because it's all tile-based but again, the combat is good.

I thought the story was adequate, but it's nothing to write home about. The only thing that would stop me from recommending it is that it's 5th edition and the more experience I have with 5th edition the more I dislike it. It's sort of like "what if D&D were made for people who can't comfortably count higher than 10?"

That said, my experience with 5th edition is limited to this game and BG3, which I really haven't played much of.

 

[Parabalus]

Best part about the lost valley is you can kill the bugs at any point to finish it.

 

[Artyoan]

This will be the second and last time I shill my campaign here. Highly suggest at least Scavenger difficulty for anyone here. Most bugs are worked out. If you do all the optional stuff you will easily be level 12 by the end.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2867325315

https://mod.io/g/solasta/m/the-forsaken-isle1

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the main thing the solasta devs accomplished was actually releasing a finished game in a reasonable time period

by modern gamedev standards that's basically a miracle