What am I missing for?

[Smurphy]

I have had my last 5 playthroughs end fairly early due to missing 5-6 attacks in a row with 70%+ chance to hit. Am I missing something? Are you supposed to miss this often, regardless of your hit chance?
I feel like I should just spam the low hit chances, as it appears the game favors whichever number is lower.

[flori2412]

Don't go for the low hit chances, that would make it only worse.

Keep in mind that missing an attack lowers your stance, weakening your defence and making your next attack far less likely to hit. This is why it's not a good idea to attack when your opponent is still at full stance.

Instead, adopt a defensive attitude and wait for your enemy to attack (and miss) first. When you have blocked one of his strikes, you can switch to an aggressive attitude and counterattack with a stance advantage. Always keep an eye on your stance and recover it as soon as possible after missing a strike.

If you need more advice than this, feel free to read my training and combat guide here on Steam.

[Smurphy]

My problem isn't the stance and combat, its that I'm literally missing 80% of my attacks, when the hit chance is higher than 75%. This seems beyond RNG, as it has happened in almost all of my playthroughs. I was being sarcastic saying to go for the low hit chances, because it's so ridiculous that a 70+ hit chance misses 6 times in a single encounter.

[flori2412]

It may be a problem of human perception: When players take a favourable chance (i.e. a hit chance of more than 70%) in a game, they will usually expect it to succeed. Because of this, most players will take note of the (relatively few) instances of failure, but not of the cases in which they succeeded.

Next time you play, try to count all the successful checks and you should notice that the RNG is not as bad as it may appear to you now.

[LuLu]

Was having the same problem. There's a point where you aren't dying in the first couple parts, but start whiffing hard on RNG for high rolls, at least in my experience. Died quite a few times to easy opponents because of this. Stick it out, feint until they miss, then go for the attack, recover, repeat. The feints delay the AI as it always recovers first, so you can drag out tough battles this way or really press the attack attitude then. If you really are feeling cheated, restart your computer. A lot of RNG's depend on the system clock as a seed.

For the long game focus on sword and coordination (for better stance recovery) or endurance skills (to give them exhaustion debuffs) and of course get your good 100 coverage armor and handy gladius, then stance doesn't even matter (almost).

You can also get out early (don't reenlist) to pad your hall of fame with 20 playthroughs and use the points only on stats in later games.

[Smurphy]

Yeah I've been doing that, and keeping track of hits misses. Fights would start similarly to the feint and attack method, but every single time I attacked, (9 / 13 for the keep track response) it was a miss. They were all circles past ~65, it just seems strange. I will try focusing skills over my starting items and see if that helps at all, though the upgrades for 1 point eventually cost more than upgrading my starting sword to the best available, seems not worth it to me.

[LuLu]

There's a stat formula X +- (.98 / sqrt(n)) which gives you the error margin of your rolls with 95% probability of covering the true value (X is expected percentage 0 to 1, n is number of rolls). Doing the math .65 - (.98 / sqrt(13)) = .378 ; .65 + (.98 / sqrt(13)) = .922, so you were likely to roll successes 37.8% to 92.2% of the time in reality, based on a 65% chance to hit and 13 rolls. 4/13 successes is 31%, so you got really unlucky that fight unless your expected stats were more like 55%. My stat professor once said that if you wrote down the random flips of a coin and a human's guess of flips, the random one is the one with the longest string of heads/tails. Just keep trying, you'll get a good seed eventually.

I'd like more RNG's to use the error margin estimation for a smaller number of rolls rather than pure perfect probability. With 1000 rolls you'd be closer to an actual 65% rate but gut feeling says it feels unfair. If you saw 35% - 90% chance though, that might be a bit different.

I was getting bad rolls last night again too, dying a few times with great stats but bad rolls. Easy opponents doing 30 damage in neck strikes or something. Yeah, at a point the stat cost is too high, but that's just a balance issue. I go for Awareness, Charisma, Quickness in the rolls for the story stuff, and then pad combat stats. Leave a pair (Str/Con or End/Coord) for workouts and boost the others.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by LuLu:

Yeah, at a point the stat cost is too high, but that's just a balance issue. I go for Awareness, Charisma, Quickness in the rolls for the story stuff, and then pad combat stats. Leave a pair (Str/Con or End/Coord) for workouts and boost the others.

Why do you need to "leave a pair for workouts"? The amount you can improve is based on the value set at character creation isn't it, not on the average of 50? I'd boost the important ones (ideally as many as possible, but this depends on how much they end up costing - usually I end up boosting most stats by about the same, unless there's one stat that starts stupidly low).

IMO awareness, quickness and endurance at least 60 tends to help with not getting wiped out due to stance loss (enemy feints, etc.), as well as fatigue. Higher is better of course, but I found starting with those at least at 60 makes a significant difference to early battles.

[LuLu]

Originally posted by MoreEvilSquid:

Why do you need to "leave a pair for workouts"? The amount you can improve is based on the value set at character creation isn't it, not on the average of 50? I'd boost the important ones (ideally as many as possible, but this depends on how much they end up costing - usually I end up boosting most stats by about the same, unless there's one stat that starts stupidly low).

IMO awareness, quickness and endurance at least 60 tends to help with not getting wiped out due to stance loss (enemy feints, etc.), as well as fatigue. Higher is better of course, but I found starting with those at least at 60 makes a significant difference to early battles.

I just meant that to min/max a bit more I prefer to focus on bumping QWK/CRD and to a lesser degree END (since usefulness drops off after 60) in creation b/c the STR/CON pair is more necessary late-game. I figure you have plenty of time to workout and boost a lower pair of combat stats to equivalent levels if you hardly work the already high enough stats in-game. Same kind of thinking when I prefer to buy stats over items, and hard-to-come-by mental skills over combat skills, because money will come after fights, but stats cost precious time to build.

I agree Endurance is a top priority early on. The difference can absolutely be felt, but after ~65 END only helps story-related rolls and wasn't much of a hindrance even at that level, in my experience. I think it's safe to bump it to 60 in creation and then leave it, unless you're going for events like wrestling or races. Most enemies won't fatigue themselves in the 20 rounds a fight lasts, and duels can be stretched out on just 60pts too.

After a few more playthroughs, I'm really starting to appreciate the sword/shield skills and morale in determining how a fight goes. Definitely recommend to make more sacrifices to get superb morale.

[GloriousRuse]

As a note, I once wrote an FAQ on the RNG because of certain rage posts. Sertorious was kind enough to contact me and adjust my probability bounding to make it more accurate...so here are some possible reasons:

1. The thumbs up/down is not actually bounded 0-100. You will never have a 0% or 100% chance to hit. Making up rough numbers, you may run 10-95%. The actual bounding is determined by a host of stat comparisons. While it is theoretically possible to get up above 95% as your upper bound per Sertorious...well, its not likely unless you've been ubermensching for a while. So when you see a "looks like 70...well, maybe 65" it may be closer to the high 50s, low 60s.

2. Probability strings have to be assessed in the context of literally hundreds of sequential rolls. While in one string of five rolls, missing five 65% chances is unlikely, something like 0.5%. In 250 rolls - even counting them as bunches rather than each new roll starting a new string - the cumulative odds that one of your 5 roll strings at 65% will go bad is actually closer to 23%. As new strings it gets worse. So even being kind to the player, about 1/4 of your play throughs should see this type of missing before mid game.

3. Now, for it to happen five times in a row would be very unlikely., but the reality is you never actually get a five stringer of 65's. The variables change by you missing, him recovering, you hitting and closing the spear range, etc. all mean that between attack rolls your odds of having five sequential rounds a exactly the same probability are not good. Combined with imperfect knowledge via the thumb, and earlier bounding, and all the goodness of human perception - well, the rolls we're trying to model as 65% may be anywhere between the mid 50s to high 70s, with the mid 50s failing more often and creating the perception of failing a sequence of high rolls.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by LuLu:

Originally posted by MoreEvilSquid:

Why do you need to "leave a pair for workouts"? The amount you can improve is based on the value set at character creation isn't it, not on the average of 50? I'd boost the important ones (ideally as many as possible, but this depends on how much they end up costing - usually I end up boosting most stats by about the same, unless there's one stat that starts stupidly low).

IMO awareness, quickness and endurance at least 60 tends to help with not getting wiped out due to stance loss (enemy feints, etc.), as well as fatigue. Higher is better of course, but I found starting with those at least at 60 makes a significant difference to early battles.

I just meant that to min/max a bit more I prefer to focus on bumping QWK/CRD and to a lesser degree END (since usefulness drops off after 60) in creation b/c the STR/CON pair is more necessary late-game. I figure you have plenty of time to workout and boost a lower pair of combat stats to equivalent levels if you hardly work the already high enough stats in-game. Same kind of thinking when I prefer to buy stats over items, and hard-to-come-by mental skills over combat skills, because money will come after fights, but stats cost precious time to build.

I agree Endurance is a top priority early on. The difference can absolutely be felt, but after ~65 END only helps story-related rolls and wasn't much of a hindrance even at that level, in my experience. I think it's safe to bump it to 60 in creation and then leave it, unless you're going for events like wrestling or races. Most enemies won't fatigue themselves in the 20 rounds a fight lasts, and duels can be stretched out on just 60pts too.

After a few more playthroughs, I'm really starting to appreciate the sword/shield skills and morale in determining how a fight goes. Definitely recommend to make more sacrifices to get superb morale.

Oh OK, yeah I agree with pretty much everything you said, since I prioritise skills based on how hard they are to improve as well (which is why I always skew the initial stat rolls toward "mental" stats).

When I first played this game, I took a balanced approach between improving sword, shield, javelin and working out to increase stats. That's definitely NOT a good idea! Sword is of prime importance, with shield close behind (or possibly reversed, if you prefer more defensive plays). Javelin can be really awesome, but it's not as high a priority as sword/shield.

Stat improvements, if your stats are already "good enough" across the board, can wait until you're at a point where it's starting to become difficult to improve sword/shield. IMO it's more important early to to gamble/hang out/play games in between training sword/shield, since not only does that reduce the training morale penalty but it also improves your rating with the troops, which is of vital importance to access the better training (consistently).

[lordspartan4]

I have more than once failed an aprox 90% hit chance I ♥♥♥♥ you not 9 times in a row. It happens sometimes keep playing you'll make it through as annoying as those can be.