As far as difficulty goes, I feel like its at a pretty decent spot for me. I'm not having to optimize every unit in every stage to get through, but also am not just "setting and forgetting" unit lineups and using the same ones every time. I'm playing on the medium difficulty level. By far my most OP unit is a cavalry unit with Maria(?)/Adel/Clive/Renault. Maria(it starts with an M, but I forget her name) is up front with her shield to take the hits, and then the three guys in the back row just keep buffing themselves with that cavalry charge and just rolling over most units. Not that they don't have counters, but unless I put them up against flyers, they will usually KO the other unit in one round. And on top of that, the huge mobility that cavalry get, its pretty ridiculous.
Does anyone know what the hard difficulty does? I wonder if it just bumps up stats, or does it also add extra units/change unit makeups around? I'll probably finish this play through, and then go through the hard mode and try harder to optimize units.
The unit comp that I'm having the most trouble with currently is something like two gladiators up front, and two elven fencers in the back. The ground spike magic attack that they do just rips my units to shreds. Any suggestions on how to deal with that kind of unit?
Also, what is the deal with certain accessories and having no description with them. Like I've run across a few now that I had to look up what they do because they don't have any description in game (rookie egg, golden egg). Seems like a pretty easy thing to catch and fix.
On the switch the right joystick rotates between pages of description for items. Is it possible you're on page 2, which only features on items that grant an AP or PP ability?
I have the switch version, and accessories like rookie egg, golden egg, miser's bracelet do not have any description (on either page) that I can tell. Though now that I think about it, I haven't hooked it up to the wifi at my (relatively) new place. Maybe they patched it, and I didn't receive the patch for it?
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
On the PS5 it is the right analog stick as well to switch between pages. There was a day 1 patch, but if you bought the physical version I guess you might have missed it.
With regard to difficulty the biggest changes are reduced stamina for your units and reduced valor gain, up until you hit expert at which point it also limits you to 10 items per mission. The enemies do take less damage and deal more but those are actually less bothersome than the other changes.
I don't consider the low difficulty, even on the highest (non-NG+) setting an issue since it's conducive towards fucking around and it still feels like your decisions and strategies actually matter and there are enough of them to keep things fresh, though I've also been deliberately handicapping myself pretty severely with only very rare item use, not creating deathballs that I know I could, skimping on the broken valor stuff, not using stat boosting items, and prioritizing characters I like in leadership positions, even when their leader skill is worthless.
I still do think they could do quite a bit to smooth out the curve and make things feel better though. But it's still a fantastic game, even as I get distracted from playing it constantly because I don't want to touch it unless I have a 2-3 hour chunk of time for it to suck up, which I've gotten too few of the last couple weeks.
It's a tough combat system to make it feel consistently challenging. Most of the units have some direct counter - you can see what kind of units your up against in advance and basically can then move around whomever to only have to face units they are favored against - and then again it's just showing you if they are favored enough when you start the battle. The harder they make the combat - the more it probably pushes you to have to use those counters instead of your favorites, which probably isnt that fun.
There was a small Liberation quest east of the 1st walled city you liberate:
A small fort map with I think 4 enemies, but one of them is a thief that plunders you from halfway across the map, then runs away and hides behind the fort. Actually getting around the fort to engage the thief, without engaging and killing the enemy commander, was the trickiest part.
IIRC this (or even one of the earlier fights) is supposed to be teaching you about item use.
Use Beckoning Bells to keep thieves from running and to pull archers and mages off towers to stop them from freely reinforcing with greater power.
Ironically this kind of is a game with semi-limited items but you really should use them as necessary, it makes life so much easier.
Never! Only if there's no other option and victory is mathematically impossible without using items.
You can also use a thief's plunder ability to steal your money back.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Eggs definitely have a description on PS5, unless they broke it with a patch after I stopped playing as I had the platinum.
I know why it happens, but it always amuses me when I check for a ranged arrow/magic assist, and my damage dealt goes down and damage taken up. Like, WTF?
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
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SpectrumArcher of InfernoChaldea Rec RoomRegistered Userregular
Does anyone know what the hard difficulty does? I wonder if it just bumps up stats, or does it also add extra units/change unit makeups around? I'll probably finish this play through, and then go through the hard mode and try harder to optimize units.
As difficulty goes up, unit Stamina goes down, Valor gains go down, enemy stats go up (modestly). Unit comps and equipment are exactly the same. Additionally on Expert and up you are limited to 10 (or 5) item uses per stage, and on True Zenoiran if you lose an entire squad, then they stay dead unless you use Hallowed Ash to bring them back.
Also, what is the deal with certain accessories and having no description with them. Like I've run across a few now that I had to look up what they do because they don't have any description in game (rookie egg, golden egg). Seems like a pretty easy thing to catch and fix.
Those accessories have descriptions on PS5. Are you sure you didn't go to the 2nd page by accident?
The translation does have a few bugs like Shaman Defensive Curse is wrong, but I haven't seen missing ones.
Having almost cleared the game, I think there are a few minor mechanical tweaks I'd make based on my/others experience with the game:
Support attacks function off their own RNG. At present, supports are hugely powerful not for their damage, but for giving you multiple different fight rerolls for basically no reason. They could still dramatically change fights due to tactics, but be much weaker.
Decreased differential between cavalry/foot unit movespeed or increased penalty for foot units with a cavalry leader. Cavalry unit mobility being triple that of infantry, and still likely doubling unit speed with them as the leader in a 5-squad compared to another leader, is pretty awkward and makes big maps really clunky.
Moving unit positions in the squad requires a full redeploy or valor point cost similar to swapping the leader. I never moved unit positions in combat, but multiple people complained that their gameplay experience boiled down to sending mediocre squads out and randomly rearranging their characters to get marginally improved combat out of it, and I think it's probably good for the devs to push back on that.
Improved fight preview; specifically, noting what health characters will end at.
Similarly, an improved status indicator for how many units are alive (color of the health bar?)
More map variety. The conceit of the game kind of makes it difficult to do much besides FE1 style conquer-keeps maps, but there are so many defensive options and anti-rushdown tools that just do not matter 99% of the time.
On a similar note, maybe balancing items a bit more so defensive items are worthwhile and so there's not basically redundant stuff everywhere (golden hourglasses are just stamina steaks with extra hoops, the super hourglass is a weak tent with way more hoops, etc.)
I don't think most of that would be a huge change to how the game plays in a lot of cases but it'd sand off some of the weird edges and make things function a bit more intuitively/smoothly.
Hourglasses at least help you in the one specific scenario when an enemy unit spends valor to force yours to wait and then attacks while you're stuck waiting.
Hourglasses at least help you in the one specific scenario when an enemy unit spends valor to force yours to wait and then attacks while you're stuck waiting.
I think you misunderstood my point; hourglasses are strictly better than the more expensive and rare meat items, because you can always choose to simply wait -> immediately pop a gold hourglass for a full stamina restore. You can also use them on a unit that isn't waiting, and it just... doesn't do anything, so it's an extremely clunky way to do stamina restoration (and, similarly, I think getting full stamina from a food item doesn't actually cancel a wait, but I haven't done that in forever to test).
I hadn't been equipping shit for a while, just building up a reserve of stuff, and... if/when there is a sequel, they need to fix the fucking item/equipment menu. It's a nightmarish fiasco of usability problems when you're trying to deal with an entire fucking army. Like, why the fuck can you not sort from the main item menu, and why does your sorting get reset every time you equip something?
Oh yeah, that's another thing. The equipment menu is awful, and not helped by crowding it into the same screen as your gambits. At minimum, hiding equipped items on other units should be a filter, and preferably instead of a bunch of useless sorting options you could have all of those options be filters so you could look for stuff that has skills and isn't equipped and then sort that by like, item ID or whatever.
I was sorting by ID and then Not Equipped to be able to see what was actually available and in some kind of sensical ordering, but as soon as you close the menu for any reason, such as selecting an item to equip it, that sorting gets reset back to... whatever the fuck the default is. Order acquired maybe? So you open it again, and have to resort it again, but oh, I want to put this accessory on someone else, which means... closing the menu and then having to do that again.
Plus having to go through and unequip all the trash generic units so I could sell their crap just to get it out of the menus. And there's no button for "strip unit naked". You have to manually select each weapon, shield, and accessory in turn. Even when selling. Every single Bronze Bangle is unique. Why? Because of that 'super power an equipment' thing? There's a button right there to indicate they can be stacked, but you can't stack equipment.
I hadn't been equipping shit for a while, just building up a reserve of stuff, and... if/when there is a sequel, they need to fix the fucking item/equipment menu. It's a nightmarish fiasco of usability problems when you're trying to deal with an entire fucking army. Like, why the fuck can you not sort from the main item menu, and why does your sorting get reset every time you equip something?
And when you choose an accessory to equip and it gives you the units that can equip it, it only shows you what's in one of their accessory slots, should show both and let you choose which to replace.
I hadn't been equipping shit for a while, just building up a reserve of stuff, and... if/when there is a sequel, they need to fix the fucking item/equipment menu. It's a nightmarish fiasco of usability problems when you're trying to deal with an entire fucking army. Like, why the fuck can you not sort from the main item menu, and why does your sorting get reset every time you equip something?
And when you choose an accessory to equip and it gives you the units that can equip it, it only shows you what's in one of their accessory slots, should show both and let you choose which to replace.
This was biting me for a bit with the Swordsmasters and their double swords, but that was also partially on me for not remembering that a class can have two swords equipped.
I don't think I understood how the hourglasses worked. I stepped on a trap once and tried to use an hourglass to negate the trap wait time and it did nothing, so I hadn't tried to use one since. I'm high 20s/low 30s and heading into late Bastoria/early Albion basically. The game is very enjoyable but does still have some issues with UI functionality and things.
I'm playing on Switch and my Golden Eggs and stuff definitely have stats/descriptions for me as of last night when I was playing.
Just to update on the item description thing, yes it was a thing with the update. I had bought the physical copy, and since I hadn't used my switch since I moved places, hadn't connected to the new wifi, so it didn't receive the day 1 patch. Patched it last night, and now I actually see the descriptions for a lot of things that I was missing! Some of the accessories actually make sense now (had no idea how many descriptions I had been missing! )
thanks for the heads up on that, furlion!
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
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SpectrumArcher of InfernoChaldea Rec RoomRegistered Userregular
The translation does have a few bugs like Shaman Defensive Curse is wrong, but I haven't seen missing ones.
Speaking of which, a couple others that might trip people up:
General's Bow doesn't buff your own flyers, it buffs anyone attacking enemy flyers. There's a similar item that does the same for cavalry.
The Magia item for Hastened Magick doesn't buff an ally, it's user only.
The Gryphon Skill is -1 AP to an enemy who is at 100% HP, not whatever nonsense it says.
The translation does have a few bugs like Shaman Defensive Curse is wrong, but I haven't seen missing ones.
Speaking of which, a couple others that might trip people up:
General's Bow doesn't buff your own flyers, it buffs anyone attacking enemy flyers. There's a similar item that does the same for cavalry.
The Magia item for Hastened Magick doesn't buff an ally, it's user only.
The Gryphon Skill is -1 AP to an enemy who is at 100% HP, not whatever nonsense it says.
Well that first and third one make a lot more sense!
Huh. I was wondering why elven archer assist damage seemed so swingy for the enemy and uniformly garbage for me compared to the arbalists/hunters previously.
Then I saw that their ranged assist deals physical damage. So if the elves have magic bows equipped... well, oops. Your own leader skill is wrong damage typed.
The dedicated assist team should have an Offensive/Offensive Arbalist stacked with attack improving accessories as the leader anyways, since it only cares about the leader's attack stat and how many same assist type units are in the squad.
If they're levels stay up they will absolutely decimate scouts, fliers, castors, and anyone else poorly armored before the fight even starts.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Did one more Side Quest in Cornia, but got nervous when Josef told me we really should be doing the main quest, so I proceeded to follow his advice.
The last quest I did was the last one I started when I was still in the Demo, fighting Berenice the Mercenary. It wasn't a huge affair, so I probably should have done it first, since I would have been able to finish it, then start Adel's (not sure why I was calling him Cain) quest, which ended up being quite long of a map, and then have the Demo kick me to the full version.
As an aside, I was little taken aback at how detailed the visible thighs were for the Sellsword units. Why do they wear those puffy shirts: to mask their similarly huge biceps?
With Berenice in tow, I did the tutorial for mining, then I headed to the Main Quest finally. Sorry it took so long to rescue you, Scarlett, but there were towns to capture and units to recruit!
What a proper story battle! Huge map, multiple fronts, siege equipment, knocking down gates, flying over mountains... it had everything! I mopped up everything, then took down Renault. I was surprised there was a continuation of the fight after a cutscene, with units as I left them, and even more surprised to be facing the final boss! I thought maybe it might be an unwinnable boss fight, especially given his gambits (immune to attacks, and aoe set HP to 1), but I was actually able to beat him without losing a single unit.
I think what helped was the unit I used to kill his two guards and wear him down. Yahna conferred ice on the front liner, and he froze one guard, then Yahna targeted the unit with the highest hp% to freeze the other guard. Auch lit the boss on fire, and he took a ton of burn damage from taking so many turns. Then as a parting shot Auch ignited the burning boss, which did aoe damage to the frozen guards, killing them.
Then it was just a matter of withdrawing 3 units for Valor Points, then using Alain's Valor Skill to give my strongest unit First Strike and +100% EXP so they could finish off the boss before his reduce hp to 1 then attack combo. It took a while to figure everything out perfectly, but it was oh so satisfying.
With the Main Quest finished, I proceeded to:
Go north through the gate above the recently liberated Walled City (which starts fully restored, nice) and did a pass through the northern 180 degrees of Cornia. I found what I think are all the locations of the remaining Side/Liberation/Sigil/Overworld quests in this zone, picked up a ton of Divine Shards and Town Resources, filled in most of the map (save for the area blocked by level 38-40) battles, and found a level 25 battle blocking access to the northern zone. Now flush with materials, I was able to restore my remaining towns, which really kick started my in-game economy and gave me a steady stream of new materials, which should help me restore further towns.
Satisfied with my expanded To Do List, I went back to do Side Quests from lowest recommended level on:
There was a bunch of stuff in the Southeast, kind of between 3 and 6 o'clock on the circle that is Cornia. Besides freeing towns/forts, highlights include meeting Selvie and unlocking a Sigil fight, which is a repeatable battle for grinding, which seems nice, and helping temporary party member Mille find her sister Nina to recruit.
I probably could have done most of that stuff before the level 8 main quest. I also figured out where the source of my anxiety over missable characters and confusion regarding that came from:
I had read that Renault is missable if you do everything you possibly can before fighting him, which is why I was hesitant to do just that like I normally do. Turns out what it was is that Renault is missable in the demo if you clear all the Liberation quests in Cornia, because the demo automatically ends and doesn't let you go to any other zone if you get that far in the main quest. You can still recruit him after finishing Liberation quests in other zones.
Question: For the next step in the Main Quest:
I can go to Elfland or Drakenhold next, but is there a canonically "correct" choice? Will the recommended levels help me decide? I still have to tour the northern half of Cornia again and finish up those quests, but it'd be nice to have an idea.
I can go to Elfland or Drakenhold next, but is there a canonically "correct" choice? Will the recommended levels help me decide? I still have to tour the northern half of Cornia again and finish up those quests, but it'd be nice to have an idea.
Drakenhold missions start like 5 or 6 levels lower, so definitely that's where you're expected to go first. Northern Cornia is also higher level than early Drakenhold. But do at least swing by elven territory; you get a free character without having to fight anything.
Wyvern on
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
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SpectrumArcher of InfernoChaldea Rec RoomRegistered Userregular
I probably could have done most of that stuff before the level 8 main quest. I also figured out where the source of my anxiety over missable characters and confusion regarding that came from:
I had read that Renault is missable if you do everything you possibly can before fighting him, which is why I was hesitant to do just that like I normally do. Turns out what it was is that Renault is missable in the demo if you clear all the Liberation quests in Cornia, because the demo automatically ends and doesn't let you go to any other zone if you get that far in the main quest. You can still recruit him after finishing Liberation quests in other zones.
Yes, I did something similar. I deliberately left the two Liberation quests in the NW and two of the higher level ones of the south of Cornia undone because I'd heard about leaving 4 left.
I can go to Elfland or Drakenhold next, but is there a canonically "correct" choice? Will the recommended levels help me decide? I still have to tour the northern half of Cornia again and finish up those quests, but it'd be nice to have an idea.
If you really wanted to optimize, yeah use the recommended levels, storyline interruption be damned:
Dip your toe into Elheim, get the free character, walk around and pick up as much free stuff as you can to start the timers on respawn
Do the first 1/3rd of Drakenhold
Go up and do Northern Cornia
Do most of the rest of Drakenhold
Interleave the end of Drakenhold with the start of Elheim
If you, like me, just go and do Northern Cornia right off the bat post Scarlett, early Drakenhold will be too easy, but at least they give you a full party's worth of characters to setup to suck up most of the otherwise wasted xp almost immediately.
Spectrum on
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
I probably could have done most of that stuff before the level 8 main quest. I also figured out where the source of my anxiety over missable characters and confusion regarding that came from:
I had read that Renault is missable if you do everything you possibly can before fighting him, which is why I was hesitant to do just that like I normally do. Turns out what it was is that Renault is missable in the demo if you clear all the Liberation quests in Cornia, because the demo automatically ends and doesn't let you go to any other zone if you get that far in the main quest. You can still recruit him after finishing Liberation quests in other zones.
Yes, I did something similar. I deliberately left the two Liberation quests in the NW and two of the higher level ones of the south of Cornia undone because I'd heard about leaving 4 left.
I can go to Elfland or Drakenhold next, but is there a canonically "correct" choice? Will the recommended levels help me decide? I still have to tour the northern half of Cornia again and finish up those quests, but it'd be nice to have an idea.
If you really wanted to optimize, yeah use the recommended levels, storyline interruption be damned:
Dip your toe into Elheim, get the free character, walk around and pick up as much free stuff as you can to start the timers on respawn
Do the first 1/3rd of Drakenhold
Go up and do Northern Cornia
Do most of the rest of Drakenhold
Interleave the end of Drakenhold with the start of Elheim
If you, like me, just go and do Northern Cornia right off the bat post Scarlett, early Drakenhold will be too easy, but at least they give you a full party's worth of characters to setup to suck up most of the otherwise wasted xp almost immediately.
Whelp
I already cleared most of northern Cornia before even thinking about looking at either Main Scenario destination. I have I think one 13 and two 14 lv. difficulty quests left.
While on the subject of Northern Cornia: Melisandre certainly seems to be a firecracker of a character. She seems fun.
I also did Monica's quest, got ambushed, and rode out wave after wave of enemy in a guard tower. Now that unit is level 15 and has stopped gaining XP for now. Oh well.
There was also a tiny Liberation quest for a fort against two Shaman and two Gladiators, and near as I can tell their only strategy was survive until my timer expires. Ended up being kind of a pain to kill them, but I got there.
I also checked the four carvings, and got a rad sword that gives +5 stats?! Seems real good for chapter 1.
The translation does have a few bugs like Shaman Defensive Curse is wrong, but I haven't seen missing ones.
Speaking of which, a couple others that might trip people up:
General's Bow doesn't buff your own flyers, it buffs anyone attacking enemy flyers. There's a similar item that does the same for cavalry.
The Magia item for Hastened Magick doesn't buff an ally, it's user only.
The Gryphon Skill is -1 AP to an enemy who is at 100% HP, not whatever nonsense it says.
I was trying to figure out why that general's lance wasn't working the way I thought it should. Thanks for the heads up.
chrono_traveller on
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
After watching that one GMTK video on Balatro's vexing design problem ("whether to include a perfect prediction of a hand's value"), I'm finding myself feeling that Unicorn Overlord might actually be better without the clairvoyant battle preview. Putting aside the cases where you get a rosy preview at distance and then assists and RNG scroll mean you're getting a more realistic outcome, being able to micromanage the RNG feels... wrong? Like I'm legally allowed to twiddle the dice until I get a landing I like. Since unit interactions are so well-defined anyway, you should be able to eyeball the units and have an idea of whether, say, charging your horsemen into a flock of fliers will turn out well for them.
Keep the pre-battle preview, let the player make last-minute tactics revisions or item uses, but don't show them the future.
Or, if we want to keep reporting some sense of your chances, do a miniature Monte Carlo simulation exercise and run the battle ten or twenty times with different RNs, then report the ratio of victories by each side and use a new seed for the real battle. (Leading to cases where you lose a "100%" battle because the preview just didn't find a losing case. )
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
I probably could have done most of that stuff before the level 8 main quest. I also figured out where the source of my anxiety over missable characters and confusion regarding that came from:
I had read that Renault is missable if you do everything you possibly can before fighting him, which is why I was hesitant to do just that like I normally do. Turns out what it was is that Renault is missable in the demo if you clear all the Liberation quests in Cornia, because the demo automatically ends and doesn't let you go to any other zone if you get that far in the main quest. You can still recruit him after finishing Liberation quests in other zones.
Yes, I did something similar. I deliberately left the two Liberation quests in the NW and two of the higher level ones of the south of Cornia undone because I'd heard about leaving 4 left.
I can go to Elfland or Drakenhold next, but is there a canonically "correct" choice? Will the recommended levels help me decide? I still have to tour the northern half of Cornia again and finish up those quests, but it'd be nice to have an idea.
If you really wanted to optimize, yeah use the recommended levels, storyline interruption be damned:
Dip your toe into Elheim, get the free character, walk around and pick up as much free stuff as you can to start the timers on respawn
Do the first 1/3rd of Drakenhold
Go up and do Northern Cornia
Do most of the rest of Drakenhold
Interleave the end of Drakenhold with the start of Elheim
If you, like me, just go and do Northern Cornia right off the bat post Scarlett, early Drakenhold will be too easy, but at least they give you a full party's worth of characters to setup to suck up most of the otherwise wasted xp almost immediately.
Whelp
I already cleared most of northern Cornia before even thinking about looking at either Main Scenario destination. I have I think one 13 and two 14 lv. difficulty quests left.
While on the subject of Northern Cornia: Melisandre certainly seems to be a firecracker of a character. She seems fun.
I also did Monica's quest, got ambushed, and rode out wave after wave of enemy in a guard tower. Now that unit is level 15 and has stopped gaining XP for now. Oh well.
There was also a tiny Liberation quest for a fort against two Shaman and two Gladiators, and near as I can tell their only strategy was survive until my timer expires. Ended up being kind of a pain to kill them, but I got there.
I also checked the four carvings, and got a rad sword that gives +5 stats?! Seems real good for chapter 1.
Kingsblade Cornix is basically one of the best swords in the game, period.
After watching that one GMTK video on Balatro's vexing design problem ("whether to include a perfect prediction of a hand's value"), I'm finding myself feeling that Unicorn Overlord might actually be better without the clairvoyant battle preview. Putting aside the cases where you get a rosy preview at distance and then assists and RNG scroll mean you're getting a more realistic outcome, being able to micromanage the RNG feels... wrong? Like I'm legally allowed to twiddle the dice until I get a landing I like. Since unit interactions are so well-defined anyway, you should be able to eyeball the units and have an idea of whether, say, charging your horsemen into a flock of fliers will turn out well for them.
Keep the pre-battle preview, let the player make last-minute tactics revisions or item uses, but don't show them the future.
Or, if we want to keep reporting some sense of your chances, do a miniature Monte Carlo simulation exercise and run the battle ten or twenty times with different RNs, then report the ratio of victories by each side and use a new seed for the real battle. (Leading to cases where you lose a "100%" battle because the preview just didn't find a losing case. )
I think it's a little inevitable to have the prediction thing since stuff's so swingy. If it was more like Ogre Battle where units were a lot more generalized, you could probably get away without having it at all, but it helps because a lot of interactions aren't hugely obvious, and especially boss enemies often have some unusual loadout or piece of equipment that makes things extra fucky. And there are a lot of ways to do that, and it naturally kind of goes in that direction anyway as the game advances and units get more moves, which smooths out the RNG a lot since things aren't hinging on a single roll/attack.
I do agree that it could probably be much more obfuscated though. Like, for example, you could have it run 10 sims in the background, and from that, it'd be able to describe the most likely result, and the certainty of it, and just say like Certain Probability: Complete Victory, or Results Unclear: Minor Loss, etc. Hell, make that a mechanic that a Gambler class gets to see the sims and erase a couple before the game chooses at random which to use.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited April 5
As far as the rerolls go I wonder how much of a problem that really is cause it is kind of a "you're doing it to yourself" situation.
And I dunno when gamers start complaining about how the devs are not stopping them from gaming the system I have to roll my eyes a bit.
Now I do think it's a bit silly where it's most obvious, when using an assist actually gives you a worst chance of winning. That definitely needs work.
I feel like rerolling like that only really helps you with fights you know that tactically speaking you probably should not be winning. Like taking your melee group up against fliers and rerolling until you get the round where you pass every evade check. It sure doesn't help you against more solid tactics. And I know I'd rather have the current system over one that says my flier team should win against their melee team, and then once in whoops I flip tails on all the coin rolls and they steamroll me.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
So, computers struggle to produce truly random numbers. Usually what programmers do is a complicated series of operations on a particular stretch of computer memory, producing numbers that aren't truly random, but are unpredictable to humans, which is good enough.
Now, here's the thing: when you start a battle in UO, the random number generator (RNG) is in a particular state. Maybe the next number is 37, let's say. That value of 37 is going to come up the next time the game asks for a random number, regardless of what purpose it's being asked for. It might be used to test the accuracy of the first character's attack, for instance, and let's say 37 is good enough to hit. But what if you, say, revise your tactics so that someone has a "At start of battle: attack enemy" effect? Now that value of 37 is being used for that attack's accuracy check instead. When that unit who was originally attacking first gets their turn, their accuracy check doesn't get 37, it gets whatever comes after 37 in the sequence-- maybe 5 (a miss). And the battle may turn out differently because of it.
What's under contention is the fact that UO lets you see the impact of your choices in advance. You can see how, sometimes, using an Ranged Assist makes things worse because it leaves the RNG in a state that gives the enemy more advantageous rolls.
Personally, I'd rather not know and I kind of wish there were an option to turn the clairvoyant preview off.
Kupi on
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
The game would be pretty dogshit without combat previews without a total rework of a bunch of other systems though.
E: To elaborate, the game is extremely heavily dependent on you being able to pick accurate tactics, especially early on, as you need to win fights to earn valor points and mostly need valor points to field a larger squad and to make up for taking damage. Without previews the start of tons of maps, and especially trying new squads or to bring a squad along for levelling, would be miserable and force a bunch of pointless resets
The game would be pretty dogshit without combat previews without a total rework of a bunch of other systems though.
E: To elaborate, the game is extremely heavily dependent on you being able to pick accurate tactics, especially early on, as you need to win fights to earn valor points and mostly need valor points to field a larger squad and to make up for taking damage. Without previews the start of tons of maps, and especially trying new squads or to bring a squad along for levelling, would be miserable and force a bunch of pointless resets
I don't think I agree. The game already gives you plenty of practice situations (e.g. the random mooks on the map, and the dudes hanging out near the merc hiring places, sparring against your own units) to practice on without having to go into a full fledged battle. I feel like I've been pretty sloppy with many unit compositions (I constantly experiment a bit, try to keep a good portion of my army close to the level of the battle, etc.) and I think I've had to restart one battle because I absolutely didn't pay attention to the enemy unit preview, and I'm sitting on like 30 corny ashes (I maybe have used once just to speed up the battle, mostly).
I realize that this is sounding like a kind of flex, but I didn't mean it to be. Its just that in my experience, there is already a lot of wiggle room in terms of difficulty, and not having perfect information about the result of a battle would not eliminate it. I quite like the idea someone else had on this thread that, instead of giving us a perfect preview, maybe have the game do 10 simulations in the background, and then give us a rough probability of victory/estimated damage report from that. It would make each battle a bit more suspenseful, and make the player adjust their strategy on the fly more.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
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On the switch the right joystick rotates between pages of description for items. Is it possible you're on page 2, which only features on items that grant an AP or PP ability?
With regard to difficulty the biggest changes are reduced stamina for your units and reduced valor gain, up until you hit expert at which point it also limits you to 10 items per mission. The enemies do take less damage and deal more but those are actually less bothersome than the other changes.
PSN:Furlion
I still do think they could do quite a bit to smooth out the curve and make things feel better though. But it's still a fantastic game, even as I get distracted from playing it constantly because I don't want to touch it unless I have a 2-3 hour chunk of time for it to suck up, which I've gotten too few of the last couple weeks.
As of today they still do. Can confirm.
PSN:Furlion
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
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Those accessories have descriptions on PS5. Are you sure you didn't go to the 2nd page by accident?
The translation does have a few bugs like Shaman Defensive Curse is wrong, but I haven't seen missing ones.
I don't think most of that would be a huge change to how the game plays in a lot of cases but it'd sand off some of the weird edges and make things function a bit more intuitively/smoothly.
I think you misunderstood my point; hourglasses are strictly better than the more expensive and rare meat items, because you can always choose to simply wait -> immediately pop a gold hourglass for a full stamina restore. You can also use them on a unit that isn't waiting, and it just... doesn't do anything, so it's an extremely clunky way to do stamina restoration (and, similarly, I think getting full stamina from a food item doesn't actually cancel a wait, but I haven't done that in forever to test).
Plus having to go through and unequip all the trash generic units so I could sell their crap just to get it out of the menus. And there's no button for "strip unit naked". You have to manually select each weapon, shield, and accessory in turn. Even when selling. Every single Bronze Bangle is unique. Why? Because of that 'super power an equipment' thing? There's a button right there to indicate they can be stacked, but you can't stack equipment.
And when you choose an accessory to equip and it gives you the units that can equip it, it only shows you what's in one of their accessory slots, should show both and let you choose which to replace.
This was biting me for a bit with the Swordsmasters and their double swords, but that was also partially on me for not remembering that a class can have two swords equipped.
I'm playing on Switch and my Golden Eggs and stuff definitely have stats/descriptions for me as of last night when I was playing.
thanks for the heads up on that, furlion!
General's Bow doesn't buff your own flyers, it buffs anyone attacking enemy flyers. There's a similar item that does the same for cavalry.
The Magia item for Hastened Magick doesn't buff an ally, it's user only.
The Gryphon Skill is -1 AP to an enemy who is at 100% HP, not whatever nonsense it says.
Well that first and third one make a lot more sense!
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Then I saw that their ranged assist deals physical damage. So if the elves have magic bows equipped... well, oops. Your own leader skill is wrong damage typed.
If they're levels stay up they will absolutely decimate scouts, fliers, castors, and anyone else poorly armored before the fight even starts.
As an aside, I was little taken aback at how detailed the visible thighs were for the Sellsword units. Why do they wear those puffy shirts: to mask their similarly huge biceps?
With Berenice in tow, I did the tutorial for mining, then I headed to the Main Quest finally. Sorry it took so long to rescue you, Scarlett, but there were towns to capture and units to recruit!
What a proper story battle! Huge map, multiple fronts, siege equipment, knocking down gates, flying over mountains... it had everything! I mopped up everything, then took down Renault. I was surprised there was a continuation of the fight after a cutscene, with units as I left them, and even more surprised to be facing the final boss! I thought maybe it might be an unwinnable boss fight, especially given his gambits (immune to attacks, and aoe set HP to 1), but I was actually able to beat him without losing a single unit.
I think what helped was the unit I used to kill his two guards and wear him down. Yahna conferred ice on the front liner, and he froze one guard, then Yahna targeted the unit with the highest hp% to freeze the other guard. Auch lit the boss on fire, and he took a ton of burn damage from taking so many turns. Then as a parting shot Auch ignited the burning boss, which did aoe damage to the frozen guards, killing them.
Then it was just a matter of withdrawing 3 units for Valor Points, then using Alain's Valor Skill to give my strongest unit First Strike and +100% EXP so they could finish off the boss before his reduce hp to 1 then attack combo. It took a while to figure everything out perfectly, but it was oh so satisfying.
With the Main Quest finished, I proceeded to:
Satisfied with my expanded To Do List, I went back to do Side Quests from lowest recommended level on:
I probably could have done most of that stuff before the level 8 main quest. I also figured out where the source of my anxiety over missable characters and confusion regarding that came from:
Question: For the next step in the Main Quest:
Dip your toe into Elheim, get the free character, walk around and pick up as much free stuff as you can to start the timers on respawn
Do the first 1/3rd of Drakenhold
Go up and do Northern Cornia
Do most of the rest of Drakenhold
Interleave the end of Drakenhold with the start of Elheim
If you, like me, just go and do Northern Cornia right off the bat post Scarlett, early Drakenhold will be too easy, but at least they give you a full party's worth of characters to setup to suck up most of the otherwise wasted xp almost immediately.
Whelp
While on the subject of Northern Cornia: Melisandre certainly seems to be a firecracker of a character. She seems fun.
I also did Monica's quest, got ambushed, and rode out wave after wave of enemy in a guard tower. Now that unit is level 15 and has stopped gaining XP for now. Oh well.
There was also a tiny Liberation quest for a fort against two Shaman and two Gladiators, and near as I can tell their only strategy was survive until my timer expires. Ended up being kind of a pain to kill them, but I got there.
I also checked the four carvings, and got a rad sword that gives +5 stats?! Seems real good for chapter 1.
I was trying to figure out why that general's lance wasn't working the way I thought it should. Thanks for the heads up.
Keep the pre-battle preview, let the player make last-minute tactics revisions or item uses, but don't show them the future.
Or, if we want to keep reporting some sense of your chances, do a miniature Monte Carlo simulation exercise and run the battle ten or twenty times with different RNs, then report the ratio of victories by each side and use a new seed for the real battle. (Leading to cases where you lose a "100%" battle because the preview just didn't find a losing case.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I think it's a little inevitable to have the prediction thing since stuff's so swingy. If it was more like Ogre Battle where units were a lot more generalized, you could probably get away without having it at all, but it helps because a lot of interactions aren't hugely obvious, and especially boss enemies often have some unusual loadout or piece of equipment that makes things extra fucky. And there are a lot of ways to do that, and it naturally kind of goes in that direction anyway as the game advances and units get more moves, which smooths out the RNG a lot since things aren't hinging on a single roll/attack.
I do agree that it could probably be much more obfuscated though. Like, for example, you could have it run 10 sims in the background, and from that, it'd be able to describe the most likely result, and the certainty of it, and just say like Certain Probability: Complete Victory, or Results Unclear: Minor Loss, etc. Hell, make that a mechanic that a Gambler class gets to see the sims and erase a couple before the game chooses at random which to use.
And I dunno when gamers start complaining about how the devs are not stopping them from gaming the system I have to roll my eyes a bit.
Now I do think it's a bit silly where it's most obvious, when using an assist actually gives you a worst chance of winning. That definitely needs work.
I would also be perfectly fine if the battle productive was just like Heavily favored, favored, neutral disfavored etc.
Now, here's the thing: when you start a battle in UO, the random number generator (RNG) is in a particular state. Maybe the next number is 37, let's say. That value of 37 is going to come up the next time the game asks for a random number, regardless of what purpose it's being asked for. It might be used to test the accuracy of the first character's attack, for instance, and let's say 37 is good enough to hit. But what if you, say, revise your tactics so that someone has a "At start of battle: attack enemy" effect? Now that value of 37 is being used for that attack's accuracy check instead. When that unit who was originally attacking first gets their turn, their accuracy check doesn't get 37, it gets whatever comes after 37 in the sequence-- maybe 5 (a miss). And the battle may turn out differently because of it.
What's under contention is the fact that UO lets you see the impact of your choices in advance. You can see how, sometimes, using an Ranged Assist makes things worse because it leaves the RNG in a state that gives the enemy more advantageous rolls.
Personally, I'd rather not know and I kind of wish there were an option to turn the clairvoyant preview off.
E: To elaborate, the game is extremely heavily dependent on you being able to pick accurate tactics, especially early on, as you need to win fights to earn valor points and mostly need valor points to field a larger squad and to make up for taking damage. Without previews the start of tons of maps, and especially trying new squads or to bring a squad along for levelling, would be miserable and force a bunch of pointless resets
I don't think I agree. The game already gives you plenty of practice situations (e.g. the random mooks on the map, and the dudes hanging out near the merc hiring places, sparring against your own units) to practice on without having to go into a full fledged battle. I feel like I've been pretty sloppy with many unit compositions (I constantly experiment a bit, try to keep a good portion of my army close to the level of the battle, etc.) and I think I've had to restart one battle because I absolutely didn't pay attention to the enemy unit preview, and I'm sitting on like 30 corny ashes (I maybe have used once just to speed up the battle, mostly).
I realize that this is sounding like a kind of flex, but I didn't mean it to be. Its just that in my experience, there is already a lot of wiggle room in terms of difficulty, and not having perfect information about the result of a battle would not eliminate it. I quite like the idea someone else had on this thread that, instead of giving us a perfect preview, maybe have the game do 10 simulations in the background, and then give us a rough probability of victory/estimated damage report from that. It would make each battle a bit more suspenseful, and make the player adjust their strategy on the fly more.