The stat system feels like it falls apart around chapter 7. And please can we get a restart battle button.

[Flauvious]

Hi I've been enjoying the game so far, but it's getting tricky. I'm playing with random stat growth, what I believe is the intended way. So I'm on chapter 7... The previous chapter, it really felt like the stats system was starting to come apart. This chapter, it seems to have completely collapsed lol. The number values feel like they were balanced around the beginning of the game, with all the numbers being low, but by this point, there's so much random variation an unbalanced stat growth that combat has devolved into one shotting or getting one shot.

There's a few problems with this. One is that enemies in this game tend to stand there and wait for you to come into range... which means I need to first move within 4 spaces of them, so I can reach them on my next turn. But then they advance and get the first attack in. And when the guys with the 2h axe just two tap my tankiest character (since the "4" agility requirement doesn't change even as numbers grow, everyone gets double attacks vs your slow characters with low agi growth), I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to proceed here. Can't poke them because bows have range 3. Can't initiate first because everyone just has 4 movement. My only option is to advance a character into their strike range and wait a turn, but no character can survive doing that.

It's kind of odd that all stats are treated equal in terms of growth; Your health grows 1 point per rank, same as your defense and damage... even though 1 point of health isn't actually as valuable as 1 point of defense or damage. For example, if you begin the game with 20 hp and say 8 damage, then that 8 damage attack deals 40% of your 20 hp. But now a few chapters in, you increase both stats by 10 points. Now you have 30 hp, which is a 50% increase from your starting 20. But your damage, which is now at 18, received a 125% increase, and now your attacks deal 60% of a 30 health characters health, and now poeple die in 2 hits instead of 3. This just compounds as the game goes along. Theoretically you gain defense as you level to, but.. that's based on luck, and most characters are getting like 1 defense every 3 levels. Meanwhile, enemies are DEFINITELY gaining damage, because they're not relying on rng. Not to mention there's numerous ways to increase your damage, but 0 ways to increase your defense or health; there's weapon upgrades, but no armor upgrades or dodge upgrades.

There also aren't really any defensive abilities. Like if I could move my tank into range and use some kind of shield wall ability to boost his defense so he could actually survive a few hits, You'd at least have something to work with. But I can't. The only defensive ability my knight has is "gain 20% fortify if you only moved 2 or less spaces", which does absolutely nothing.

TLDR: Offense drastically outpaces defense, causing the balance to deteriorate over time, and rng stat growth just exacerbates the issue.

Oh, and since I'm having to reattempt this battle so many times, is there any chance you'll be adding a restart battle button? Because right now every time you need to restart, you have to exit to main menu and restart the chapter, going through all the dialogue over again (and there's a ton of it in chapter 7).

[Zhurtek]

Tbh I don't know if defensive items are needed so much as some more characters that aren't Guardian classes could use better defensive growths, the vast majority of the cast have defensive growths in the 40% or less range which makes your overall party extremely fragile. Even worse are a lot of characters that have 50-55% growths in multiple stats with none over 60, when its just a coin flip to get any useful stats you end up with a character that is either amazing or hot dog water depending on your luck

[Achilles]

Play on harder difficulties, dont complain you're having a bad time. Swallow your weird giga gamer ego, turn the difficulty down and move on.

[eturulja]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Lampros:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von eturulja:

Correct. The game saves your place on the turn end of every player character.

Hmm, wouldn't that conversely cause a massive save bloat - which is the case with other games where the game auto-saves after each turn?

Ursprünglich geschrieben von FroBodine:

Well, I sure hope there is an option to delete save games, then. Or does it just have one save slot, and it keeps saving over it every turn?

Regardless, when you add the ability for us to save our games whenever we want, please make sure there is an option to delete our save games. Some games forget to include that and it really sucks.

Nope! It saves to the same file "in cache", and then once the unit's turn is done it does a hard write to memory. All one file. And when you start a new chapter it wipes out the file.

I'm definitely nit picky about how much storage I'm taking up on people's computers, so no worries I'll keep it top of mind! I don't like dead saves just sitting there, even if they might be good for backups.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zhurtek:

Tbh I don't know if defensive items are needed so much as some more characters that aren't Guardian classes could use better defensive growths, the vast majority of the cast have defensive growths in the 40% or less range which makes your overall party extremely fragile. Even worse are a lot of characters that have 50-55% growths in multiple stats with none over 60, when its just a coin flip to get any useful stats you end up with a character that is either amazing or hot dog water depending on your luck

Fair point. I tried to balance some characters so they would make good "off tanks". DEF is just one of those stats that can really break the game which is why very few units (defenders mainly) have a high growth in it. But for example (Chapter 7 spoiler) Benjen has 40% growth, and enemies can't double him, making him a pretty good off tank in most situation. With DEF ring he is at 60 and becomes quite the beast. Only problem is he comes in probably at too low a level, will need to look at him and Rho's recruitment levels again.

[Flauvious]

The new characters you get in chapter 7 are actually one level lower than the two you get in chapter 6, which definitely feels like an oversight lol

[eturulja]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Flauvious:

The new characters you get in chapter 7 are actually one level lower than the two you get in chapter 6, which definitely feels like an oversight lol

It's unfortunately more tied to them appearing earlier in the game, and the levels are tied up.[\spoiler] Will look into changing it.

[Rer]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von eturulja:

It's unfortunately more tied to them appearing earlier in the game, and the levels are tied up. Will look into changing it.

Could you just re-organize the levels of the prologue fundamentally to allow them to curve out better once they're back in the game?

[eturulja]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Rer:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von eturulja:

It's unfortunately more tied to them appearing earlier in the game, and the levels are tied up. Will look into changing it.

Could you just re-organize the levels of the prologue fundamentally to allow them to curve out better once they're back in the game?

Yeah I can just make them entirely new units, it's not too hard. Just need to see if I want to promote them or not because I like that the player has the choice to promote them right now.

[alexwong945]

One thing I regret though; I choose to enable perma death, which was a mistake. I choose it because that's what I usually do with games like this, but I don't really think perma death works here. In games like battle brothers or Xcom, when your units die all you lose is their combat capabilities, but you can always replace them. In this game, not only do you lose that unit, but you lose the quests/stories with those characters, the rewards from those quests, AND you can't replace them. If I just let Erland or whatever die on the fourth mission, like he did, I would just not have a defender until chapter 7, when you get the new, woefully under leveled woman lol. So I end up redoing battles whenever anyone dies anyway. So I wish I could turn perma death off now lol.

I would like to second this comment as well. I normally enjoy games like XCom and Battle Brothers with permadeath, as it definitely makes the game feel more realistic and the stakes seem much higher.

However, in a story based game losing access to future quests, stories, and rewards really sucks and can be crippling, especially because you can't replace them on your own timetable, you have to wait until the game gives you the next character of that type.

I just lost starting the archer girl (Abigail?) on level 5. It's definitely my fault, I didn't realize the enemy archers would do so much damage. But I have no ability to replace her, and no idea when the next archer might come along. And apparently it seems like replacements will be under-leveled as well? In a game where there is no ability to grind to raise the levels of new recruits, it all adds up to basically requiring a restart whenever I lose a character, in which case I should have played with Permadeath off.

I would appreciate the ability to turn Permadeath off so I don't have to start from scratch in order to do so. I also think it would be really nice if we had the ability to recruit new units and to level-grind them. Not sure how feasible that is from a design/time/development standpoint, but the combination of story-based characters + permadeath + no control over recruitment + no ability to level new characters + needing to start over to turn off permadeath is adding up to not be an enjoyable combination for me. I already started over once to switch from variable to fixed level ups; starting over again just to turn off permadeath is making me conclude that it's better to just set this game aside for a while until some QOL updates work themselves out, especially given the apparently huge difficulty spike in Ch. 7.

I do think you are awesome in your responsiveness and the game itself is generally fun and entertaining, so I look forward to seeing what QOL updates you come up with and how the game evolves in the near future!

[eturulja]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von alexwong945:

One thing I regret though; I choose to enable perma death, which was a mistake. I choose it because that's what I usually do with games like this, but I don't really think perma death works here. In games like battle brothers or Xcom, when your units die all you lose is their combat capabilities, but you can always replace them. In this game, not only do you lose that unit, but you lose the quests/stories with those characters, the rewards from those quests, AND you can't replace them. If I just let Erland or whatever die on the fourth mission, like he did, I would just not have a defender until chapter 7, when you get the new, woefully under leveled woman lol. So I end up redoing battles whenever anyone dies anyway. So I wish I could turn perma death off now lol.

I would like to second this comment as well. I normally enjoy games like XCom and Battle Brothers with permadeath, as it definitely makes the game feel more realistic and the stakes seem much higher.

However, in a story based game losing access to future quests, stories, and rewards really sucks and can be crippling, especially because you can't replace them on your own timetable, you have to wait until the game gives you the next character of that type.

I just lost starting the archer girl (Abigail?) on level 5. It's definitely my fault, I didn't realize the enemy archers would do so much damage. But I have no ability to replace her, and no idea when the next archer might come along. And apparently it seems like replacements will be under-leveled as well? In a game where there is no ability to grind to raise the levels of new recruits, it all adds up to basically requiring a restart whenever I lose a character, in which case I should have played with Permadeath off.

I would appreciate the ability to turn Permadeath off so I don't have to start from scratch in order to do so. I also think it would be really nice if we had the ability to recruit new units and to level-grind them. Not sure how feasible that is from a design/time/development standpoint, but the combination of story-based characters + permadeath + no control over recruitment + no ability to level new characters + needing to start over to turn off permadeath is adding up to not be an enjoyable combination for me. I already started over once to switch from variable to fixed level ups; starting over again just to turn off permadeath is making me conclude that it's better to just set this game aside for a while until some QOL updates work themselves out, especially given the apparently huge difficulty spike in Ch. 7.

I do think you are awesome in your responsiveness and the game itself is generally fun and entertaining, so I look forward to seeing what QOL updates you come up with and how the game evolves in the near future!

Hey Alex! Thanks for the kind words at the end there and the great feedback. It's actually pretty easy to change the permadeath in your save manually. If you open the save file that you want to change perma-death on, around the top of the file you will see the word "Permadeath", and below it a "value". That value should be 0 if you have it on. You can update it to 1 and your save will no longer have perma-death so you don't have to restart. Like always I'd make a copy of your save you can go back to. But you should get your characters back at a minimum that have died so far.

Let me know if that makes sense, or you can send me the save and I can edit it for you!

Local save location: C:\Users\{your_username}\AppData\LocalLow\eBrothers LLC\Those Who Rule\thoseWhoRuleSaveFinalV1_{X}.es3 (Where 'X' is the save slot, 0 if it's a mid-battle "continue save").

[eturulja]

And yeah there is no real ability to grind right now with training chapters or anything like that, which was a conscious design choice I made because I didn't want to make it too simple to over-level the enemies.

I am thinking of introducing an item that gives 50% EXP when allies gain XP within 2 tiles to a unit if they are underleveled. I'd probably put it in the base from the start, and make it pretty cheap so you can easily have your underleveled units catch back up just by hanging around your other units, and they can chip in where they can until they are on level. Let me know what you think of that idea!

[CaoLex]

SRW uses another approach (and Final Fantasy Tactics in a sense too), they allow to send some your units to "mission" making them undeployable but giving them exp after you finish the mission.

[Cat]

A fix for grinding is to cap out the exp curve for enemies equal to or below your level to make it more of a tool for the getting lower level units up to speed than over grinding the older ones. I don't know how easy something like that would be but a catch up mechanic would help a bit given the limited nature of the missions.

[roogun]

How about setting the level of newe Units to the average party level? I don'T know if this can be done without much effort

[Lampros]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von eturulja:

And yeah there is no real ability to grind right now with training chapters or anything like that, which was a conscious design choice I made because I didn't want to make it too simple to over-level the enemies.

I am thinking of introducing an item that gives 50% EXP when allies gain XP within 2 tiles to a unit if they are underleveled. I'd probably put it in the base from the start, and make it pretty cheap so you can easily have your underleveled units catch back up just by hanging around your other units, and they can chip in where they can until they are on level. Let me know what you think of that idea!

Please do. Also, what about special skills for the "essential" characters to distinguish them further for role-play purposes?

[CaoLex]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Lampros:

Also, what about special skills for the "essential" characters to distinguish them further for role-play purposes?

They are here. For every playable character there is two special traits and different growths.