Recent content by Northcott

LDominating said:

We can implement a system where if you escape beign a prisoner we choose an allied city to spawn?
You know so we don't get taken prisoner like 3 seconds later.

I know TW it's like a brain storm thing that should have been added with the release.
It's hard to believe joining an army and losing is possible
It couldn't be the AI not utilising a moutain with 150 fians and instead going STRONK into Sturgian T5 infantry.
Weird..

Click to expand...

I sometimes wonder if the game creates a sense of difficulty by making the Player Character's allies particularly idiotic. I can't count the number of times I've now seen armies march into horrid odds, or box themselves into dead ends so they can get steamrolled. Or watching the AI-controlled Sturgians from other lords go charging across big, open fields toward Battanian archers... and they don't even seem to think of raising their shields until a quarter of them are dead. Bloody Sea Raiders know to hold up a shield, but Sturgians don't.

Agreed. This is a major issue with Singleplayer games, and completely wrecks the experience. So much of the play is dependant on building alliances, earning friendship or enmity, that having one half of that equation functionally disappear is more than a little frustrating.

I'd have no problem at all with the slow levelling/skill progression if characters started out at least moderately competent to begin with.

Instead, you get a background in which you may spend all your formative years focused on training towards one end, only to end up with skill roughly on par with looters -- who are supposed to be drunken, ragged, good-for-nothings. That's inane.

If you started out with your 'professional' skills floating somewhere around 80-90-ish, perhaps with a couple floating lower than that to flesh things out, that would make for a decent base. Then the slow skill progression makes a kind of sense, as you hone your way from being yet another person with some training in war/smithing/leadership/etc, to someone of singular ability and reputation. Or abandon your original career and try to build those lesser skills. But at least you'd have a base.

Part of the problem is that many tasks can't be accomplished with lower skill, and while players can win fights against the AI with lower skill, the game play just feels bad. Combat is clunky and unresponsive. It's not until you get to roughtly 90-100 in skill that it starts to feel smoother and responsive.

Sir Pwn-A-Lot said:

It's pretty obvious that all skill gains are ****ed in one way or another. I've been playing ~20 hours on this save and my leadership only went from 15 to 16.

Click to expand...

Mine has ticked once. 250-ish days of game time, God knows how many battles... Athletics (a heavily focused skill) is still below 50. Riding (also heavily focused) has just hit the 70's. Even worse, companions grow at a fraction of that rate. I think the fastest I've seen (outside of scouting, which is probably the fastest of the lot) was one companion rising by four or five points in a skill, in a couple hundred days of game time.


XP and skill gains are utterly fubar at the moment.

Relationship with lords is either heavily bugged, or not fully implemented. I'm not sure which it is.

You no longer get a boost in relationship for being allies in battles with them, for riding in to save them from a close battle, or rescuing them from enemy lords who have them captive. You /should/ be getting a boost in relationship every time you fight alongside each other. Military campaigns are supposed to be the easy way to get in good with the local lords.

You can advance past the cap, it's just sloooooow.

My character's Charm has increased 8 points beyond his cap.

Midnitewolf said:

Yeah, it is kind of BS for a Looter with a pitchfork to stab my horse when my lance with a 220 length apparently can't reach him. I mean I get that I am seated back from the head and chest of my horse so he has to strike a shorter distance than I do but a lance should actually be long enough that you still need something longer than a pitchfork to hit my horse first.

Click to expand...

Hell, last night my character got stabbed with a pitchfork, while my 'fine steel menavilion' with over 200 length whiffed, coming up short. I feel your pain.

lcmiracle said:

I could do it in 1.03 and 04, though I haven't tried in 05. I play exclusively in first person view (yes, I exist), and it felt to me the control had been mostly the same. At times though it seems it must be the tip of the lance to contact the enemy for it to count as a hit. I thought it silly when the shaft of the lance just passed through the bandit I was charging.
Though using swords and whatnot are slightly more difficult now, I found I had to "lean" to the side to hit. Read somewhere it was due to character height. Maybe your character's too tall you had to adjust your aim accordingly.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I play in 3rd person rather than 1st -- that's probably the issue. And yes, the angles have changed considerably from the last time. I've started hitting with the couched lance now, but I have to basically be looking at my horse's front hooves to do so, rather than looking at the target. And after getting lance hits down last night, I'm more convinced than ever that the collision mesh is a little screwy -- especially after ending up with my lance literally poking right through the middle of a guy's torso without damaging him (and it sounds like you experienced something very similar).

The more I play this, the more I think they made a mistake in transitioning away from the prior set-up for combat. It's not just lances, but many weapons on horseback now require essentially looking at the ground rather than at what you're trying to hit or where you're going, and that's counter-intuitive. The game no longer 'feels' right to me. I still play it, it's still fun, but it feels like it's lost something. Combat used to feel graceful when you were on a roll. Now it feels jerky and stilted.

As an aside; short weapons now seem much easier to use on horseback. The 'only the tip' issue seems to work against long cavalry swords, too. But if you use a standard infantry axe or mace, which should be sub-optimal, they now rock from horseback.

After downloading the recent patch, the political landscape shifted. While the Western Empire was starting to steamroll my game, suddenly every other nation was at war with them and chipping them down.

Either I lucked out, or this patch tweaked something important.