I understand why its there, but I have all these guidebooks, but not enough points to fully do what I want without my mercs having to gain about 50 levels and having to waste lessons learning skills just to untrain them later is not something I'll do.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Now that Jesse is gone, Tomas is going to clean up some of the code and get tournaments in (very soon). It will obviously be a little slower as this was all Jesse was working on. I really want Tomas to start into a couple of the other things too. I will post a monthly update in a couple days of where everything is at for all projects.
Current Report: Your mercenaries report that they crossed path with a mendicant priest. Wearing a twisted rope of herbs and dried fruits around his neck, the priest warned your mercenaries about a vicious disease through the area. When a bell chimed three times in the distance, the priest apologized and hurried away.
What do you do?
1) Beat the priest for information [10m]
I really feel like the bad guy here. Find a priest and the first thing my group thinks of is "BEAT HIM WITH A CUDGEL!"
Edit: Also, really like the changes and whatnot. Are the last three known adventuring skills (arson/torture/trap) going to be available through more expanded adventures, or will they be something you get from tournaments?
I trained and equipped a team on the first day, but this system is so goddamned fiddly and such a pain in the ass to use that I don't have any desire to ever change them. The commands to put gear on my mercenaries are still BUY KIT, MEQ KIT UNPACK, MEQ LIST, MEQ ## SHOW, MEQ ## ASSIGN ##, to just see how gear works and to put it on a mercenary.
When I start an adventure it should tell me the goddamn number so I don't have to to a LIST just to get the number
Let me forget skills level by level. When I want to go from Rank 5 to rank 4 to reallocate points, I don't want to have to throw away half of the full value of the skill and then relearn back to level 4.
This is still too lesson intensive, imo. It's an interesting system that might actually be fun if it wasn't 5 stupid commands and a list lookup to do anything with it, and it shouldn't just be relegated to the upper tiers of "Well, I have literally nothing else to do with these lessons".
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I also feel like, even with 85% chance of success on some Part 2 adventures(those ones are skills with a rank 5, 16 stat attribute in the needed stat, and a level 2 offhand item), it still feels like a crapshoot
Can we get something done with MERC FIGHT LIST? I know that it doesn't have the same circumstances as the adventure list, but it's starting to get pretty lengthy. Is it possible to have it list them so that you'd see your most recent fights on the first page and your oldest fights on the last (if you ever wanted to see how terrible your mercs were)?
My biggest problem with the Mercenaries, probably, is that there's no real element of choice.
I wrote an automatic adventuring system today and literally all it does is pick the first option repeatedly until the adventure is over one way or the other, because that's always the best choice to make. I don't know if they're fighting, disguising, climbing, or battering... and I don't really care, because the 10m option is the best option every time. I don't even look at the choices anymore.
There's not even a real choice as far as how you make your team. In other games, you might have various ways to solve problems. Maybe you sent out a small elite team of thieves/spies and they sneak in, locate the cure, and steal it without getting caught. Maybe another solution would be to catch the stables on fire and assault the laboratory when the majority of the guards are all distracted fighting the fire. Maybe you just send in the Vikings and they broadsword everybody to death because Vikings.
In this game, you have no choice other than to make your party as generalist as possible, because you're going to do whatever's in the 10 minute slot. Maybe this means you kill all the guards at the gate, burn down the stable, poison the guard at the tower door, and then stealthily steal the cure from the safe after defeating the entire purpose of being stealthy by having already bloodily murdered anybody who could do anything about it.
This need to cover all the bases makes the teams feel somewhat generic for me; at the high end, my team should be somewhat indiscernible from another high end team, because we've both got the exact same tools being used against the exact same problems. And once you set that generalist team up, you just blindly choose the 10m option. It's not Iluv's spy team and Mercer's A-Team and my Viking horde, it's just the same basic set of dudes using the exact same abilities.
It's really quite boring and the only reason I haven't taken my lesson investment out of it is because I'm afraid you will try to jam this down our throats by making it mandatory for sect warfare or the like and I'll have to do it up again.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Manual battles in FFT style, with movement based on chess code with custom tiles like water or hills for environment effects.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
I enjoy the idea behind the system overall, and the rewards have definitely picked up pace with the time / lesson investment involved in completing an adventure.
What @Khizan said, however, is particularly true in regards to the 8 hour options. You can select 48 10m options in the time it takes to complete 1 8 hour option. The only reason to ever pick this is going to sleep or work or whatever. In Find the Cure I, it was looking quite positive, because there was a 10m, a 3h and a 48m, but based on everything else continuing with 10m, 3h and 8h it seems more like an accident or bug rather than anything else.
From some of the comments made earler, I thought it was heading towards more being along the lines of you can choose to approach this 10m option using, disguise, sabotage or batter.
Otherwise I would have thought maybe some of the 3h or 8h options completed maybe 2 or 3 events of the mission or something like that? Took a long time more but wasn't worth the same as an option that is 48 times faster. I'm not entirely sure where the balance is, or where it's supposed to be intending to go.
Are there any plans for something like staffs or wands for int-based mercenaries?
I put in an idea for this too, so I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of it
I just think it's weird to have a mercenary with int-based robes, int attack skills, int adventure skills ... and then a dirk they can't use just for the speed bonus.
I'd like to see mercenary tournaments give some sort of prize to 2nd and 3rd place groups as well so that someone can't dominate the rankings every week and become unbeatable, especially since the 'strength' of a group is highly dependent on how many spare credits/lessons were available.
On that note, is there no reward if the tournament ends in a draw? That's kinda... sucky.
Can we have a MERC FIGHT SUMMARY command (or something similar) to see the current group display for mercenaries in a fight? It's hard sometimes to remember what enemy mercenary was where in a 500 round fight.
Additionally, can we have a forfeit command in MERC FIGHT as well? It sucks to make a mistake with merc placement (admittedly, 100% my fault) and have to sit through 500 rounds of absolutely nothing.
So, the mercenary tournaments have been going on for a while now, and I'm just wondering if there's an estimated time left until they get revised?
As it stands now, there's a pattern completely dependent on a single person.
(with mercer included in each) 2 participants: Team that fights mercer wins tournament. 3 participants: Ends with a draw in the 2nd round. 4 participants: Team that fights mercer wins tournament. 5 participants: Ends with a draw in the 2nd round. 6 participants: Never happened before, but the team that fights mercer wins the tournament.
And so it repeats. If mercer drops out of the tournament for whatever reason, nobody will ever win a weekly tournament unless there is only 1 participant or a new beatable team joins.
How difficult would it be to modify the output of MERC EQ LIST and add in a new option of "EQUIPPED"?
I am thinking that changing how the eq list is displayed to be more like shops would really help remove the trouble one goes through of managing the equipment item numbers for each merc.
For example, instead of a single line for each item like:
MERC EQ LIST ARMOR would ignore equipped items while grouping up the remaining identical items, displaying the id number of the first available item and looking something like this:
ID Equipment Slot Available ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 345 a tattered robe armor 2 346 a faded woolen robe armor 2 347 corroded bronze armor armor 2 389 a frayed cotton robe armor 2
For the example above, the ID would show the first available type for that piece of equipment, so as 345 and 371 are both "a tattered robe", 345 will show on the display until it is equipped, in which case 371 would now be showing for 'a tattered robe' and the available number would be 1.
MERC EQ LIST EQUIPPED would show the previously ignored items ungrouped like so:
ID Equipment Slot Equipped by ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 390 seedy leather armor armor Nyth Stonesinner 1868 a tattered robe armor Oeth Firelancer
My reasoning behind this is that my equipment list is... massive, and while the sort option helps a lot, if you don't remember the name of the item, becomes a hassle to look through the list for the single sword that is different from the other 600.
Rewards for the rank I adventures are better adventuring skills while the rewards for rank II adventures are better combat skills. After that, winning the weekly tournament (a game of chance, currently) gets you even better equipment and skills. There isn't any other way to get these besides winning the tournament though, and it's tough to get enough to actually use.
How about the gold and exp rewards? I'm greedy :> And I haven't seen any guidebooks in shops, so no idea what they're selling for or if people sell the stuff. Didn't look for equipment yet, though.
How high do the ratings go? Is it just a matter of watching the hire board for better ones, or is there some way to bump it up?
Comments
I understand why its there, but I have all these guidebooks, but not enough points to fully do what I want without my mercs having to gain about 50 levels and having to waste lessons learning skills just to untrain them later is not something I'll do.
I didn't know whether it was a bug which is why I asked if anyone knew what it was.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
lucking your way through nine 10 minute options on a Part 2 adventure and getting a 100% success option on the last one
it might take 8 hours, but a win is a win
Your mercenaries report that they crossed path with a mendicant priest. Wearing a twisted rope of herbs and dried fruits around his neck, the priest warned your mercenaries about a vicious disease through the area. When a bell chimed three times in the distance, the priest apologized and hurried away.
What do you do?
1) Beat the priest for information [10m]
I really feel like the bad guy here. Find a priest and the first thing my group thinks of is "BEAT HIM WITH A CUDGEL!"
Edit: Also, really like the changes and whatnot. Are the last three known adventuring skills (arson/torture/trap) going to be available through more expanded adventures, or will they be something you get from tournaments?
Still dislike many aspects of it.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
My biggest problem with the Mercenaries, probably, is that there's no real element of choice.
I wrote an automatic adventuring system today and literally all it does is pick the first option repeatedly until the adventure is over one way or the other, because that's always the best choice to make. I don't know if they're fighting, disguising, climbing, or battering... and I don't really care, because the 10m option is the best option every time. I don't even look at the choices anymore.
There's not even a real choice as far as how you make your team. In other games, you might have various ways to solve problems. Maybe you sent out a small elite team of thieves/spies and they sneak in, locate the cure, and steal it without getting caught. Maybe another solution would be to catch the stables on fire and assault the laboratory when the majority of the guards are all distracted fighting the fire. Maybe you just send in the Vikings and they broadsword everybody to death because Vikings.
In this game, you have no choice other than to make your party as generalist as possible, because you're going to do whatever's in the 10 minute slot. Maybe this means you kill all the guards at the gate, burn down the stable, poison the guard at the tower door, and then stealthily steal the cure from the safe after defeating the entire purpose of being stealthy by having already bloodily murdered anybody who could do anything about it.
This need to cover all the bases makes the teams feel somewhat generic for me; at the high end, my team should be somewhat indiscernible from another high end team, because we've both got the exact same tools being used against the exact same problems. And once you set that generalist team up, you just blindly choose the 10m option. It's not Iluv's spy team and Mercer's A-Team and my Viking horde, it's just the same basic set of dudes using the exact same abilities.
It's really quite boring and the only reason I haven't taken my lesson investment out of it is because I'm afraid you will try to jam this down our throats by making it mandatory for sect warfare or the like and I'll have to do it up again.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
If a fight between @Seraphyne and I had is any indicator
On that note, is there no reward if the tournament ends in a draw? That's kinda... sucky.
Additionally, can we have a forfeit command in MERC FIGHT as well? It sucks to make a mistake with merc placement (admittedly, 100% my fault) and have to sit through 500 rounds of absolutely nothing.
As it stands now, there's a pattern completely dependent on a single person.
(with mercer included in each)
2 participants: Team that fights mercer wins tournament.
3 participants: Ends with a draw in the 2nd round.
4 participants: Team that fights mercer wins tournament.
5 participants: Ends with a draw in the 2nd round.
6 participants: Never happened before, but the team that fights mercer wins the tournament.
And so it repeats. If mercer drops out of the tournament for whatever reason, nobody will ever win a weekly tournament unless there is only 1 participant or a new beatable team joins.
I am thinking that changing how the eq list is displayed to be more like shops would really help remove the trouble one goes through of managing the equipment item numbers for each merc.
For example, instead of a single line for each item like:
ID Equipment Slot Equipped
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
345 a tattered robe armor (not equipped)
346 a faded woolen robe armor (not equipped)
347 corroded bronze armor armor (not equipped)
371 a tattered robe armor (not equipped)
373 a faded woolen robe armor (not equipped)
374 corroded bronze armor armor (not equipped)
389 a frayed cotton robe armor (not equipped)
390 seedy leather armor armor Nyth Stonesinner
1868 a tattered robe armor Oeth Firelancer
MERC EQ LIST ARMOR would ignore equipped items while grouping up the remaining identical items, displaying the id number of the first available item and looking something like this:
ID Equipment Slot Available
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
345 a tattered robe armor 2
346 a faded woolen robe armor 2
347 corroded bronze armor armor 2
389 a frayed cotton robe armor 2
For the example above, the ID would show the first available type for that piece of equipment, so as 345 and 371 are both "a tattered robe", 345 will show on the display until it is equipped, in which case 371 would now be showing for 'a tattered robe' and the available number would be 1.
MERC EQ LIST EQUIPPED would show the previously ignored items ungrouped like so:
ID Equipment Slot Equipped by
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
390 seedy leather armor armor Nyth Stonesinner
1868 a tattered robe armor Oeth Firelancer
My reasoning behind this is that my equipment list is... massive, and while the sort option helps a lot, if you don't remember the name of the item, becomes a hassle to look through the list for the single sword that is different from the other 600.
Tournament rewards:
Adventuring - Arson, Explosives
Combat - Punch, Throw, Backstab, Sneak Attack, Bleed, Strike, Ice lance(?)
Passive - Fortify, Buttress
Those are just the ones I've gotten so far.
I've sold guidebooks for 3k each, tourney guidebooks I've kept because they're rare.
If you need basic rank 2 equipment, I have more than I could ever use (maybe).
Highest merc rating is 3, I believe. If there's a 4 I've never seen one.