Faction level way too important.

[Thats How We do action in Uganda]

After finishing campaign on hardest difficulty I noticed one thing.

Getting your main faction to level 10 is the best You can do, nothing is even close to upgrading your faction.

Your minions cant level up over your faction level, which means if You focus on other thigns like traps/spells/potions and other upgrades, your 15 man army will be stuck on some low lvl like 4-5.

Since low level units cant do much dmg against armor of tier 2 and tier 3 heroes, Your dmg is pathetic, increasing max level solves this problem.

While I like D4 and most changes, faction upgrades and level cap based on your faction level is very bad thing, it forces you to spend alot of resources just to raise level cap for your units, while more interesting upgrades have to wait until You get atleast one of your faction to lvl 10, it also makes way harder to mix multiple factions, since low level units are useless, level 10 imp tanks damage better than lvl 4 orc.

I personally would just let minions freely go for level 10 without any limitations, and I would reduce experience gain by like 50%, because minions gain experience very rapidly (except for undeads).

[Daisan]

Wait...unit levels depend on faction level? I thought it just depended on getting the specific rooms for them. Like for demons it would be Mana bath to get them to start leveling past 4 then torture chamber would let get them to 10. That's the impression I got, but I never stared at their levels in proportion to the faction rank

[bpACH]

Originally posted by Daisan:

Wait...unit levels depend on faction level? I thought it just depended on getting the specific rooms for them. Like for demons it would be Mana bath to get them to start leveling past 4 then torture chamber would let get them to 10. That's the impression I got, but I never stared at their levels in proportion to the faction rank

Faction level caps the level of the creatures of that type. The buildings are needed to address the needs that they develop as they level up.

The arena is special in that it levels up your units when they use it.

[Келион]

Yes this is true. Playing Orcs, who level up quickly, is much easier than playing other factions. At least that's what I thought. There is no motivation to combine factions.

[BrutalGlory]

Originally posted by Келион:

Yes this is true. Playing Orcs, who level up quickly, is much easier than playing other factions. At least that's what I thought. There is no motivation to combine factions.

I'd argue it's worse than that. On harder difficulties it's difficult to find time to even leave the dungeon to farm evilness. Usually by the time you end a game you've got the mandatory eco upgrades and only a few military ones. The only effective way to get evilness on harder settings to get military upgrades quickly is the prison - which means you're almost locked into using undead as your endgame force (or delaying horde upgrades for awhile).

Demons shouldn't even be touched - evilness being used to revive them is a terrible design choice.

[Sly Marbo]

Originally posted by BrutalGlory:

Demons shouldn't even be touched - evilness being used to revive them is a terrible design choice.

Which is very bad design. Game should be about getting all 3 factions together and not using just one.

[KishiPhio]

Originally posted by Nekrin de Nekrinius:

Originally posted by BrutalGlory:

Demons shouldn't even be touched - evilness being used to revive them is a terrible design choice.

Which is very bad design. Game should be about getting all 3 factions together and not using just one.

And yet a lot of people complained about D3 because you HAD to use every faction. So what did they do ? They changed that haha

But yeah, after some hours and some missions done, I finally understood that faction levels capped creature levels, so now it's always something I upgrade.
I feel like the main focus of the game is now more focused on creature levels instead of... A dungeon builder.
And I completely agree, demons needing evilness to resurrect ? Terrible choice when you've made evilness hardly obtainable if you're too passive.
If you simply level up orcs, you will completely trash the game because ennemies are now only divided into elites and non-elites...
The prison isn't very useful to produce evilness, the torture room isn't very useful to produce evilness... Like, why...

[KishiPhio]

Like, it was that way before, levels were strong in D3, but the current research system and lack of depth (No infinite upgrades anymore ? :c) makes it that levelling up creatures is the very, very strong

[Malecite]

I have found this as well.

Especially with orcs who go from largely useless to insanely OP at level 5 with the champ upgrades. The fact that faction level controls your unit level cap seems somewhat counterintuitive.

The biggest issue with this game is how utterly annoying it is to acquire evilness. You basically need to focus on spells, potions, and then dump everything into faction upgrades to try to prevent the AI from outscaling you. Late game, unless you have the trap upgrade perk, level 3 traps, and a massive line of spikes, slime, saw blades, and a snot boulder trap, you can't stop hero waves from crushing your dungeon.

I feel like the game would be alot more fun and organic if you could just level creatures through combat without having level caps from the tech level hindering you. Especially because the faction upgrade techs take 99% of your evilness. So the game becomes about farming up enough to get level 7-10 creatures then destroying the map while being unable to really do anything interesting with the tech tree.

[KishiPhio]

Originally posted by Malecite:

I have found this as well.
I feel like the game would be alot more fun and organic if you could just level creatures through combat without having level caps from the tech level hindering you.

It's just insane to me that you need to unlock levels, and once you do, your creatures are like instantly max level AGAIN because of the sheer amount of xp, there is no grind at all, no progression, just point and click.

One thing I like to do is try to have the prison and the torture chamber to have that little plus of evilness but it's so few that you can probably do without...

Even the game acknowledges that fault because as you progress through the story, the game litterally offers you evilness on a platter more and more and more with so much objectives that you don't know which to do first.

[Willcutus]

I think tying consistent Evilness generation to higher tier rooms like the prison or torture chamber was a bit of a mistake.

In D3 once I captured one fountain of evilness, I could rely on that stream going forward. Now until I get to the point of having the higher tier rooms, I have to go get Evilness in the overworld for the most part. Once that bump runs out, I am stuck again until I get more.

I think the Vault of Evilness needs a mechanism to generate a small trickle of Evilness other than hoping to find an Artifact. Maybe something that requires a Snot dedicated to it, but something that will increase the count consistently before the other rooms would be nice.

[Malecite]

Originally posted by KishiPhio:

Originally posted by Malecite:

I have found this as well.
I feel like the game would be alot more fun and organic if you could just level creatures through combat without having level caps from the tech level hindering you.

It's just insane to me that you need to unlock levels, and once you do, your creatures are like instantly max level AGAIN because of the sheer amount of xp, there is no grind at all, no progression, just point and click.

One thing I like to do is try to have the prison and the torture chamber to have that little plus of evilness but it's so few that you can probably do without...

Even the game acknowledges that fault because as you progress through the story, the game litterally offers you evilness on a platter more and more and more with so much objectives that you don't know which to do first.

So I even tried to do a different approach yesterday. I took the dungeon research discount, trap discount and damage upgrade, and the traps generate evilness perks.

I focused on getting level 3 traps and wanted to see if it was even possible to play without my usual rushing of the faction level. I made it maybe 45 min in and got a fairly decent amount of evilness from the trap kills, before the dwarves invaded me and it was a wipe because I only had level 4 creatures.

They need to remove the evilness requirements from the faction level and potentially increase the gold cost... Or just scrap the system entirely. The way it stands now if you aren't out aggressively farming evilness and solely focused on getting your faction level up, you lose. It's that simple. The AI outscales you and some event that bypasses your traps ends the game.

[Chaos Lyulf]

Well, this explains why i'm struggling with getting the achievements on level 12. Or what lever it is that you need to get more Evilness than Thanos. I feel pretty stupid for not noticing the increase of levels based on the Fraction updates. Also explains the damn grind and waiting for those Evilness.

[Malecite]

Originally posted by Chaos Lyulf:

Well, this explains why i'm struggling with getting the achievements on level 12. Or what lever it is that you need to get more Evilness than Thanos. I feel pretty stupid for not noticing the increase of levels based on the Fraction updates. Also explains the damn grind and waiting for those Evilness.

Don't feel bad, I didn't notice it for half the game either. It's a truly stupid design decision and it's not explained anywhere that I recall. It is however, the most important part of winning the game as you need level 7 or so creatures to deal with the champion blobs late game.

[Narandia]

Its not a bad idea but I wish it wasn't one-to-one early on. Especially since the upgrades start costing evilness at different points for each.
And its not like creatures can at least earn exp for the next level in advance.

[Carnagath]

They obviously didn't like the fact that in Dungeons 3 the optimal way to play was cap 1 or 2 fountains, lay down some traps and go afk for 2 hours. The heroes rarely tried to take the fountains back. This is a nice solution to force you to be more active on the overworld map. Honestly I like the change. Constantly switching back and forth between the maps so you can keep clearing is fun. As for the level cap, on some missions it's important, on others it isn't. On defensive missions you can focus on traps and ignore the creature levels. They level up super fast if you just drop them near high level enemies that are slowed and engaged by traps. If you get outleveled that badly, you're doing it wrong. On missions where you have to be aggressive in the overworld, then yes, faction level is king.