"Savant" perk and enemy scaling.

[Ice-Nine]

I've played numerous runs through the game now, and I think the Savant perk needs to be eliminated.

It is such a huge advantage over every other perk, it's insane. And if you're playing anything harder than a normal run on normal difficulty with no challenges, then it becomes mandatory because of how fast enemy stats scale. You have to restart the game over and over until you get someone with Savant to recruit first.

I think the perk is too valuable and too necessary. I think Savant should be removed and instead everyone should grow by 2 points per battle by default, OR remove Savant and keep everyone's growth at 1 point but reduce enemy scaling.

[Entengummitiger]

Yeah, savant seems too strong if you get it early

[Will I ever bloom?]

ive beaten glory 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 without savant, took me max 3 restarts per glory, and in my honest opinion enemy scalling is a joke, they dont scale at all, the only problems i have are in 1st and 2nd tournament cause there are sometimes guys better than final fight ones and my squad is weak at that point

[Redbeak Games]

Hey Ice-Nine, thanks for the feedback! Savant is a strong perk, but I don't think it's a must-have. Normal tournament has 15 fights before the championship so that's 15 additional stats from the perk. That is very strong compared to many other perks, but it's also over time and the stats are random. 15 points is actually also the difference in stat points between a grey gladiator and a blue gladiator. So even if you get it at the start on a grey gladiator, purple and orange gladiators will be better at the late stages stat-wise. This is just on a theory level of course and I could be wrong. I am open to taking a new look at it if it seems to be a problem for many.

Originally posted by Will i ever bloom?:

ive beaten glory 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 without savant, took me max 3 restarts per glory, and in my honest opinion enemy scalling is a joke, they dont scale at all, the only problems i have are in 1st and 2nd tournament cause there are sometimes guys better than final fight ones and my squad is weak at that point

Nice job with the glory levels! Do you have some specific issues in mind with the enemy scaling? They should scale (items, skills, rarity, bonus stats), but since most of it is based on probabilities and random spreads, there can be lots of situations where a low-level gladiator is actually stronger than a higher-level gladiator. This is something I want to monitor and adjust, but it's also not an easy thing to keep in balance due to the heavily random nature of the game. Feedback on this is very valuable for balancing purposes!

[Will I ever bloom?]

well the problem with "scalling" of the enemeis is that enemy mages get STR items and skills and warriors get magic items and skills making them fairly useless and even if mages get magic skills they usually get low tier melee magic spells (which is also pretty impossible for mage to pull off in late game) :(

[Redbeak Games]

Originally posted by Will i ever bloom?:

well the problem with "scalling" of the enemeis is that enemy mages get STR items and skills and warriors get magic items and skills making them fairly useless and even if mages get magic skills they usually get low tier melee magic spells (which is also pretty impossible for mage to pull off in late game) :(

Thanks the for the clarification! Improving those should be relatively easy. I just need to play around with them a bit to ensure the enemies don't get too crazy.

[Entengummitiger]

I think there may be a general problem with too little possible synergy between the stats aligned with physical damage like str and the stats aligned with magical damage. I'm fairly new to the game, but I already adapted the heuristic of judging items and heros by their focus on either physical damage or magical damage. If a hero shows up with high str and high wisdom, he'll be the first I'll stop to consider. On the other side, a mage with 1 str or a warrior with very low wisdom is immediately interesting because I'm not paying for stats I don't use. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong and prices don't work like I think they do. But having a focused, implicit "class" for your guys seems like a very dominant strategy to me, that the ai fails at.

I think I get why there are no explicit classes in the game. More freedom, more room to explore for the player. But maybe the ai needs to be organized in a way that reflects the implicit classes