Training toughness without cheesing the hungry bandits in Skinner's Roam?

[jthibeault]

The toughness stat increases you can get by cheesing the playing dead wakeup with the hungry bandits in Skinner's Roam is way too tempting, and most of my playthrough's I end up doing that.

I end up doing this as it seems quite difficult to get any increase in toughness without cheesing this playing-dead wakeup exploit.

Anyone figured out how to get toughness into the 40-50's without cheesing?

[Kiruzune]

I tend to get a lot when I fight fogmens around Mongrel. If you have fleshies, try to maybe only aggro heavies and prince since they won't pick you up.
I always for some reason leave that area around 70 toughness.
Also gorillos are very good to train on, though for toughness more enemies seems better for training then a single good one

[Jonneh]

Playing dead doesn't work for me on large packs from skinners roam.

[bunny de fluff]

Originally posted by Jonneh:

Playing dead doesn't work for me on large packs from skinners roam.

Try beak things nest.

[Kiruzune]

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

Try beak things nest.

They will eat you if you fall and they have no other enemies nearby to attack

[bunny de fluff]

Originally posted by Draeks:

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

Try beak things nest.

They will eat you if you fall and they have no other enemies nearby to attack

You would be surprised by how long they actually let you live and how many times you can get up from playing dead.

[Kiruzune]

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

You would be surprised by how long they actually let you live and how many times you can get up from playing dead.

I would assume this means you already have a healthy ammount of toughness + armor + a hint of luck. If they get you on your leg, your days are numbered, you'd never outrun them and they always start chewing you up.

[bunny de fluff]

The guy who is training must already have at least 20 toughness to take a few hits of the beak. You need someone else with fast leg to hide at about 600m away from the training, preferably a hiver, no robot legs necessary , every time they almost catch up to you press stop and they would start to swing their heads and you click again to run quickly.

[happy]

play on damage x 2 or x3, your thoughness becomes the the stat that you want to catch up with.

It's not really cheese, even if you revert to normal damage afer a a while because...life is dangerous at x2^^

[Rocket Witch]

Use the FCS to make a mod that changes the global constant (button to list these is in top left) for toughness XP (last item on the list). Default multiplier is 1.33; maybe make it 3 or something, so you can gain lots of toughness for playing normally and not feel the need to cheese.

[Pyrrhus]

Skimmers and gorrillos are good for toughness training from around 30's to 100.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by jthibeault:

The toughness stat increases you can get by cheesing the playing dead wakeup with the hungry bandits in Skinner's Roam is way too tempting, and most of my playthrough's I end up doing that.

I end up doing this as it seems quite difficult to get any increase in toughness without cheesing this playing-dead wakeup exploit.

Anyone figured out how to get toughness into the 40-50's without cheesing?

It's not necessarily easy or rewarding in a gameplay sense to purposefully train toughness... That's why so many players cheese it using prisoner mechanics or sly work-arounds. The overall "best way" is to just play the game and take on enemy types as you're able. The problem there is... that's a bunch of enemies if you're playing with a decently sized group of characters. (Most of them won't get hit.)

In Shek territory, you can hunt for Berserkers and Band of Bones. Make sure you've got some decent armor, though, so you won't lose limbs. *Unless you want to. :) They are not very common spawns, though, which is sad...

There are tons of Dust Bandit groups/camps in The Border Zone. You can gather a sort of manageable minimum sized group and send them out for training against the Dust Bandits. At least, up to a point... After awhile, it just takes too many encounters to make much of a difference.

I always head off to the Fog Islands for my first serious training runs when I get a sufficiently sized group together. It's especially important for crossbow training with Toothpicks, due to all the targets, and the few breakthroughs train up some Katana secondary/tougness for the crossbow users, too. Their Friendly Fire incidents as they level Precision add to training up the toughness of the hit friendlies, too. In short - It's win/win all the way around as long as you can keep from getting swarmed and dead... :)

Garru herds are good, too. You can find them in several zones. Bull Herds in Skinner's Roam work too. Fighting both the occasional Garru and Skimmers in The Great Desert can be rewarding in terms of toughness.

Fighting minor faction spawns can be good training. You can frequent areas where their patrol groups spawn and just hunt them. Some don't yield a lot of exp, like Cannibals, but some are pretty decent, like some of the "Bandit Type" minor factions (More powerful than "Dust Bandits" though.) that also have decent loot drops.

Iron/Security Spiders - These can be really good hunting if you can get enough of them. With a decent group, you can run through an area like Floodlands and clear out Iron Spiders, turn around and rinse/repeat. (Floodlands because it's easy to get to and safe.) You'll likely take them out fairly quickly, but they can put out some big hits that are worth "taking." Rotate injured melee out as you can. They are generally spaced far enough apart and have such a low detection range that you can avoid any of them if needed. Downside - Where they are located in numbers you won't find many places to heal up.

There was a patch that significantly reduced exp gains by introducing a level limiter. There are mods that reinstate those gains so that fighting lower leveled/skilled units gets you more skill related returns. IMO, it's a viable choice since it does help to make progressing a bit easier. That's especially true when you start gathering a larger crew and the only way to seriously get toughness exp is to reduce the number of characters in groups that are actively fighting enemies. As it stands now, as you get more experience and more units it gets significantly harder to get stats leveled. (I play mostly vanilla and don't use any combat-related mods.)

On Training Stats as a Goal - IMO, the game isn't balanced for top-tier/end-game character stats. So, for instance, nobody is really meant to max out everything, stat-wise. It's not really a "supported" goal for the player to actively choose to try to reach. Characters should be "good enough" to complete end-game tasks without fully maxxed stats. At least, that's how I interpret the progression curve for Kenshi. After 50+ in melee stats, I wouldn't bother. The only stat worth focus-training, combat-wise, is Precision and that's much easier to do.

Training:

<20, beat up Starving/Dust Bandits on your way to Fog Islands to hunt Fogmen groups once you have enough characters for two groups, one melee and one crossbow group. (No less than 10 Characters to have good chances of not being lunch. Buy a building in Mongrel and put some bed in it for healing up in between sorties.)

>20 with enough units to make a decent show of it, hunt... everything that isn't an Elder Beak Thing... Big herbivore packs are great if you can find them. (Gorrilos were mentioned and they're very good. Regular Beak Things, especially groups of them around nests, are excellent choices for groups of characters.) With a decent group and crossbow Precision maxxed for a couple of users and decent for the rest, you can start "hunting" Security Spiders.

> 50 means you're basically "done" with calling anything "training." All your gains after that are incidental to gameplay progression (IMO) or you'll just be going through the motions for too long for it to be considered "fun" IMO.

Note: AFAIK, you'll need to keep moving in order to get RNG groups to respawn. So, moving through three cells in a line will enable the first cell to respawn groups when you revisit it. Something like traveling the length of Skinner's Roam allows the lower portion to be respawned with RNG groups once you complete the circuit. I could be mistaken.

[ZZZZZ]

cannibals, you dont need to chase them,.. they chase you

[jthibeault]

Hey all, FYI, modding the toughness xp gain rate to 3 has worked really well.

I am doing a playthough now where I have not cheesed the toughness exploit, and after letting my guys get beat to heck, often, their toughness is now in the 50's, so they are no longer taking extra damage.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by jthibeault:

Hey all, FYI, modding the toughness xp gain rate to 3 has worked really well.

I am doing a playthough now where I have not cheesed the toughness exploit, and after letting my guys get beat to heck, often, their toughness is now in the 50's, so they are no longer taking extra damage.

Warning - That will also change the Toughness gain for loaded NPCs like guards...

So, don't plan on storming any Town and having an easy time of things. For some Towns that have guards in frequent combat, those guards are going to be... very tough if you decide to act against them.

I don't know if it has any effect on certain generated groups that aren't tied to a town generation, like Bandits. I don't recall anyone ever mentioning that, but I don't know that bandits ever really have much combat other than with town guards. (Occasional dust-ups with RNG/animals/etc, maybe. But, I don't know if they have that attribute "active" and tracked.)

[cdplayer906]

Originally posted by jthibeault:

Hey all, FYI, modding the toughness xp gain rate to 3 has worked really well.

I am doing a playthough now where I have not cheesed the toughness exploit, and after letting my guys get beat to heck, often, their toughness is now in the 50's, so they are no longer taking extra damage.

so you cheesed an fcs mechanic so you wouldn't have to cheese a gameplay mechanic? definitely makes it more streamlined but im not sure you've actually addressed the cheesing

as morkonan mentioned though, this is gonna create some odd matchups eventually. i would recommend not hanging in a single chunk exclusively for too long