It's not that bad on hardest difficulty. There's also randomia gimmick to make things easy if you need it.
Just invest into Courage/Agility for melee characters. Easy peasy lemon squeezy throw me in a pan and bake me.
Very much agree. What I like to do is throw Dwarf as a football at enemy. Once Dwarf lands on a large group. I follow up with whirlwind then use the first randomia power for extra turn to kill an annoying enemy as quickly as possible to prevent them from acting. Besides that. The other ones are kind of meh. Healing allies isn't that speculator since you should already have people that can do that. Free teleportation - I've actually never used this one due to how much it costs.
The early game is definitely very tough AND the game relies very heavily on RNG. Like the 2nd fight in the game outnumbers you and then springs a 2nd wave on you. After losing that fight 3 times in a row trying everything I could think of, I'm not sure if I was doing it wrong or just got bad rolls. To be honest I haven't picked it back up since; I felt like I had so little control over results. And this was on above average difficulty ... so yeah maybe don't start with extreme ultra death unless you want to prove how hard core you are. Come to think of it maybe I should try again on normal.
What did You ever do to you?
Just want to add to this that setting up a bunch of overwatches on turn one for free damage is also viable. If the enemy is far away from you and you don't want to compromise your formations. That's how I beat that spinning wheel encounter on hardest difficulty. Ranger, Wizardess, Elf all doing overwatch gives you opportunities to chip enemies down while they come at you. Sometimes they don't charge at you though and end up hanging to side. When they do that it gives you the chance to tighten up formation in anticipation of upcoming reinforcements.
Once you get adjusted to the idea that a character or three getting knocked out isn't the end of the fight but just the beginning and build some of your strategy around that things get easier.
Also lets you set up the powerful adjacency bonuses easier. Have to be careful of enemy AoEs but I tend to favor proximate if not tight formations to save on moves for touch heals and buffs as well.
Oh, I adjusted real fast to characters getting killed ... because there seems to be no way to stop it.
The game only feels RNG-heavy at the very beginning, after that it's anything but (in fact, they even introduce a mechanic that gives you a small benefit if you get unlucky...). The fight at the beginning with the wheel is one of the toughest in the game, but is doable if you strategize it well – I beat it on highest difficulty, my tactic being, IIRC, to actually just tank and heal the damage from the wheel, while focusing on the weaker shitters thrown at me rather than the boss, as overextending was lethal. Not that that's the only tactic there, but it worked for me.
I haven't looked up a single strat on the game or gotten a single piece of advice – it's perfectly doable even with no prior knowledge and without minmaxing. You do need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your characters, and how to synergize them – synergy between your party members is basically the cornerstone of the whole game, and you're meant to basically combo your attacks and use adjancency and flanking in your positioning.
Haha, I actually dealt with it the opposite way, waiting all that shit out in cover until Splat ran out of reinforcement (while just tanking the wheel), and then killing him and the assistant when they were the only ones left.
No, you're supposed to figure shit out for yourself like we did.
Pretty darned slow for a quick load.
