Humanoid

Only possible in Warband I think? And it'd be extremely tedious with dozens, if not hundreds of battles involving thousands of troops each required (since the AI cheats and raises instant armies). With that in mind, I'd probably estimate the point where you found your own kingdom represents, oh, about 5% progress to actually "finishing" the game.

All the weirder that the Druid promotion quest is just "hey, go talk to this other NPC" with no combat involved whatsoever. Haven't promoted any of my characters yet, so not sure which is closer to the norm though.

And yeah, they don't lock out prior areas if you've progressed to the next one, so it's perfectly okay, and in fact assumed, that you leave the harder challenges in the first area alone.

Daggers first - that is, always the lower damage attacks first. Plus you have four dagger attacks per round (assuming expert daggers) as compared to only two sword attacks. And use your Blade Dancer to Shatter instead of Challenge. Theoretically if your Ranger has Shatter it's viable too, double the chances to apply the effect, but Rangers have fewer points to spread around for utility skills since presumably they'd be raising magic skills instead. And as the amount of armour reduced scales with Warfare skill, it's not an optimal long term choice to leave the Ranger on one point of Warfare anyway. The Prime spell, Sundering, though useful, is different to Poison Spray in that it reduces armour, not evade, therefore it increases your damage but not your chance to hit. Shatter is also an armour reduction, as is the Master Earth spell Acid Splash. They're all good abilities, but don't affect hit chance and therefore won't help your Defender tank hits for you. And yeah, I think that order is pretty much optimal.

As far as I can tell, the target of enemy attacks in this game is completely random - i.e. 25% for any one character. (Previous games behaved similarly, but with hidden modifiers in that certain enemies might prefer attacking certain classes or races - e.g. goblins would mostly try to hit the dwarf) The idea then, is to use the Warfare skills to put that shield and heavy armour to good use. If you try to raise the survivability of your other party members too much, it rather defeats the point of the Defender, who performs no other real role. So really, you want to use Challenge every single turn if at all possible. But there's a catch - unless it hits, the effect doesn't work. And Defenders, with the massive hit chance penalty from wearing heavy armour, don't hit all that often. As a result, the Defender is not a very commonly taken class, as there's a lot of catch-up work that needs to be done to make it work. But to give it the best chance possible, there are a few things you can do. - Attack with your Ranger first every round. With four strikes per round, there's a good chance all the little strikes will eat up the target's block charges (the number of possible blocks - or more specifically, block attempts - per round is limited). Attacking with your Defender after the block attempts are exhausted means you only have to deal with misses (which is a function of your weapon attack value versus the target's evade score). To make this more convenient, put your Ranger to the left of your Defender in the party layout (you can drag and drop them anytime). - The expert Earth spell Poison Spray reduces the target's evade, and as a bonus is an area effect spell. Consequently you want to use this before the Defender attacks as well - and as the Ranger also benefits from this, you actually want your Earthmancer to act first. (My party setup left-to-right is Rune Priest - Bladedancer - Barbarian - Crusader to use this logic) - As with any melee class, weapon skill is god-king. But for heavy armour classes, the heavy armour skill provides an equivalent attack value boost (but no damage increase, so it's still strictly inferior). This more or less means you want to max out these skills in this order at the expense of all else. The defensive skills aren't of much benefit if you can't get the enemies to attack you in the first place, and your natural survivability is pretty high anyway, so skills like Shield, Endurance and Dodge take a back seat until you're maxed out offensively. Besides, with this approach, it means you should be able to get away with ignoring the Perception stat, and get much better value elsewhere. Note: In theory it'd be even better for the first move per turn to be the expert Light spell Radiant Weapon, which is meant to strip the target of all their blocks for the turn. I'm informed, however, that it doesn't actually work.... The general opinion on Defenders is that they're a bit of a drag for the first half of the game, maybe even two-thirds. They're sturdy throughout the game, which is nice, but can't reliably use that longevity to actually protect the rest of the party. Once Defenders reach Grandmaster Warfare, the game changes because Taunt is vastly more reliable than Challenge (I think it skips the hit check, and less foes are immune to it), and with Master shield, you have a lot of blocks, each of which can trigger retaliation attacks. When you get to this stage, Defenders are very impressive indeed. EDIT: Block mechanics aren't immediately obvious, but it's fairly simple. There's the number of block attempts per turn (call it X), and then there's the block chance (call it Y). The first X attacks against a target are rolled against Y% to determine whether it's blocked. Now, block chance and block chance bonuses from items and skills may look pitifully small, but that's only a bonus on top of a base block chance - this is 50% for player characters. (For enemies it'd be whatever hardcoded value was set for this enemy type) So with a 10% bonus from stats and items for example, every block attempt is calculated at 60% chance to block.

The best game of 1998 was Grim Fandango. DAMMIT DISNEY JUST SIGN A DEAL WITH GOG ALREADY!

I guess it is a bit of a preconception, but also a bit of an irrelevance in that it's something I'd never have been interested in anyway even if it featured genuinely good gameplay. I believe the last military-themed shooter I played was the original Battlefield 1942, and even then only briefly. (Incidentally, I remember one of my very early posts in this community, back in the BIS days, was about whether it was worth getting as a single-player game. The answer is hindsight is obviously a firm 'no'.)

When will Battlecruiser 3000AD be up then?

Well I despise ME3 and discarded it after maybe a quarter of the way through (it's somewhat irritating that it's often defended by people saying only the ending is bad - no, the beginning is just as terrible, and so is the middle), so it's not an unreasonable guess that I'd prefer Spec Ops over it had I ever played it.

Never played it, but all the feedback I get regarding it seems like a case of some cleverclogs being annoyed at one constant property of modern shooters, then, instead of taking a few minutes to write a forum post about it, decided to make a whole generic and mediocre game as a delivery method of that singular point instead to ram the point home in a tedious fashion. It's the same reason why I despise the critically acclaimed Lord of the Flies (both novel and film adaptation) as being terrible wastes of time. But in Golding's defense, he had no Internet forums to outline his points on back then. Huh, that rant turned a bit more vitriolic than I had intended.

I didn't know that movie was a thing, so I had assumed the blog was probably just a bunch of photoshopped movie posters with Steven Seagal substituted in for various other actors (e.g. Steven Seagal as the title character in Home Alone). But no, it's the real thing. Huh.

But, but, I only listed three classes! In all seriousness though, I did the usual thing of starting the game with a vaguely RPish party, taking things that looked interesting and such. But the game is tuned such that that approach turned the game into an unfun slog. If there was an "easy" difficulty (call it Peasant difficulty), I'd go with that combination. But yeah, even at Adventurer difficulty, even fights that were no real threat of dying (given enough potions for longevity) took literally three or more times longer as they are now as you chip slowly away at their health. I was already beginning to feel burnout by the end of Act 1 (the castle in particular). If that's the old school gaming experience they're trying to replicate, then it's one I want no part of. So yeah, my general advice to avoid that kind of tedium is, sadly, to min-max a fair bit, especially early on where each point you get is comparatively more impactful. For a second playthrough, sure, spread your wings a bit, but I fear a sub-par party as someone's first might end up turning them off the game altogether. - Pick one *melee* weapon skill that your class can GM and advance it to the maximum rank available to you at the cost of all else. Which means Expert at level 3, except for Spear because of stupid trainer availability. (Spears are awesome but be prepared to suffer in act 1) And keep going to 15. Weapon skill is both the best way to improve damage, and the best way to improve hit chance, to the extent that even if it did only one of those it'd still be worth taking over anything else. If this was a multiplayer game, everyone would call it brokenly overpowered. - For magic, you want Expert Earth and Novice Light as an absolute minimum, and on different characters. You also want Expert Fire on either character (or a third one). Putting all your healing eggs in one basket will make things a lot more difficult. The Fire magic is for the Burning Determination spell, which prevents the most debilitating effects you can suffer, and which makes the curative spells in the Water magic list completely optional (and by extension, Water magic itself). - With that sorted, the only real other threat is Feebleminding, with requires either Expert Air or potions to solve. But you'd want the potions anyway unless you always keep a piece of equipment with 100% Feeblemind protection on your Airmancer, and it happens comparatively rarely enough such that Air magic is nowhere near a priority as the ones listed. - Obvious, but abuse the hell out of rest. It's cheaper by at least an order of magnitude compared to patching up your party on the go (it also cures Weakness and Feeblemind), and there are no negative consequences for doing so. It also maximises the utility of your chef - you did hire the chef in the first inn, right? (But only after the Spider Lair, because you have two free NPCs to take to that)

I've read that there's two of every NPC type in the game, no more no less, so I'd assume it's the same. But he wouldn't be free unlike the quest one I guess. On melee damage classes: Two mercenaries might be painful in by the mid-game when you find that they lag in the weapon skills department. Master weapon gives 5*15 = 75% damage increase. GM gives 8*25 = 200% bonus. So that's 175% damage on your weapon, vs 300%, passive. *Every* other Might class and *every* hybrid class can GM a melee weapon, so that's not a factor. Every one of them, except the Defender, can match the Mercenaries' maximum of either Master Dual-wield or Master Two-handed. This is a very deep hole that the Merc ends up in. The Bladedancer and Barbarian pull even farther ahead from GMing those two skills respectively. Supposedly then, the Merc is meant to make up the difference via their ability to GM Warfare. That gives the ability to crit on demand. But what that's doing is making you spend a non-trivial 25 mana to match what the other classes are doing naturally. And I think that's just broken game balance. Even accounting for the fact that they yield greater benefit from the Sword and Axe masteries, they will still underperform. (But that said, if determined to go that route it means a 2H sword is the best option to take full advantage of the ability, and a 2H Axe next.) There is one niche for them however: the ability to crit on demand means the Master Mace bonus effectively becomes a stun on demand. Interesting, but I wouldn't say it's worth carrying a whole class around for when a spell can reasonably do similar things. TL;DR: Blade Dancers and Barbarians are the god-kings of melee. Rangers and Scouts are reasonably close substitutes and come with the bonus of being able to perform backup healing duties (Earth and Light mastery respectively). The Crusader is a one-of-a-kind class - a hybrid that is almost as effective with either Might or Magic. Mercenaries, Defenders and Hunters struggle to find a place in a well-balanced group. Mercs struggle with damage, Defenders struggle with game mechanics working against their intended role (until very very late game), Hunters because they're a hybrid with no viable secondary role (no access to healing magic)

Gorgon is Prosper? Who'd've thunk?

Had some decaf Diet Coke. It's really not that bad, would buy again. Would obviously have to hand in my man badge if I ever had one in the first place.

I have no idea what an Android tablet would do if you connected a trackball to it, heh. But it'd do movie playback and all that media stuff fine, won't play any PC games outside probably what would run in DOSBox, should do some basic office suite processing with the right app. Going with an 8-10" Intel "Bay Trail" Atom-based tablet running full Windows (so *not* Windows RT) would make it quite a bit more flexible for your purposes, being able to run PC games natively and be a fair bit more powerful, while only being marginally bulkier. A few models as mentioned previously are the Dell Venue Pro 8, Lenovo Miix 2 (both 8"), Asus T100, HP Omni 10 , Microsoft Surface 2 *Pro* (10" models). The Asus has a keyboard dock included, I think it's an optional accessory for the other two. EDIT: It's worth noting that the current models are limited to 32-bit Windows, and therefore only run 2GB of RAM. Sometime in the next month or two the various vendors will be releasing 64-bit capable models with 4GB RAM and Windows 8.1.

The thing with a pure archer party is that rangers and scouts, the only two classes who can GM a ranged weapon, can also GM a melee weapon. (Which, aside, highlights the sad plight of the ineffective Mercenary class even more) Without magic backing, they're going to end up mainly using those melee weapons - daggers and axes respectively. Which would work, but is sort of against the spirit of the challenge. A pure ranged party would therefore necessarily involve magic. Water magic, specifically Frozen Ground, which unfortunately neither archer class provides, and likely with the support of early Air magic, on at least a couple characters to position enemies who get close. You'll want the GM Water spell, Tsunami for sure too. So first off I'd say there's a hard requirement for either a Druid or a Shaman for the Tsunami. Now the Ranger provides one source of Air magic, so you can probably do double Ranger if desired, plus a Scout - or triple Ranger I guess, but that'd be kinda silly. This would be the maximal archery makeup I'd think. More practically, replace one of the Rangers with any spellcaster except Rune Priest (the only spellcaster with zero access to Water) for redundancy purposes. TL;DR: Ranger / Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman) or Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman) / (Druid/Shaman/Freemage)

The orbs/staves are mana-free too. But that said, checking the skill tables the runepriests and shaman at least get master weaponskills. Druids and Freemages have no such ability (and poor druids can't GM magical focus either, so the worst of both worlds). EDIT: Not mine, just a handy reference of the various skills. Checking out the tier bonuses (second tab) demonstrates how narrow your effective choices in character development are, for weapon skills in particular, the difference between a weapon that maxes out at Master compared to Grandmaster is over *double*. That is, 5% times the amount of skill points to max out master versus 8% times the points to GM. Yes, over double damage.

I started off with a notepad and writing down the various details (if you neglect to read what the expert trainers tell you after training, there's no way to get them to repeat the location of the master trainer), but soon gave up and copy-pasted the various lists into a text editor and printed it out. I'd turn in my hardcore gamer badge if I had ever earned one in the first place. Aside, I'm struggling to see the point in raising any weapon skills bar Magical Focus on the pure spellcasting classes - having a guaranteed hit on every attack surely beats the suboptimal hit chances using normal weapons. That said, both my spellcasters have amulets that prevent feeblemind, so I haven't found a situation where they were locked out of spells yet (other than general stuns and y'know, death). But only early in Act 2 so I don't know how it progresses.

Would it be too outlandish to suggest they're being incentivised to produce this type of editorial? Wouldn't surprise anyone.

Put one point in bows/crossbows for everyone but no more. It's just there to use when you have nothing better to do, but the gains from upgrading both the skill, upgrading perception, and upgrading your weapons are pitifully small that it's not worth it for the maximum three turns-ish that you get to use them in the best case scenario. The problem is exacerbated by the encounter design wherein the hardest fights are often ambushes where you can't really get into position to shoot - thus creating a situation where you mostly end up using the bows for fights that are pretty trivial in the first place. Another hint: Perception is a terribly inefficient way of improving you hit chance, as it's only worth one point per, erm, point. Contrast to increasing weapon skills, which increase it by two points, and increase damage by 5% on top of that. The heavy armour skill is also worth two points per skill point. The two-hander and dual-wield skills are only one point per point, but have pretty good expert and master bonuses. Anyway, the point is that if bows were a bit more viable as a primary source of damage, as opposed to just some supplemental damage at the start of encounters, then Perception might be reasonable value, but generally speaking, you're better off stacking Might plus the weapon skills. Miscellaneous hint: Anyway, I restarted the game in order to min-max a bit more, not because of OCD, but because the game was simply turning into a tedious slog with my initial party. Decided on a melee-heavy party, because I hate mana management. Barbarian, Bladedancer, Crusader, Runepriest. Some observations: The notion of tanking with a tough - likely a Defender - tanking character is appealing. But unfortunately until fairly late in the game, this proves to be pretty ineffective due to the unreliability of the skills needed to support this style. On the surface it's easy enough, one point in Warfare nets you the 'taunt' ability to force the enemy to attack your tank. But working against you are the difficulty in actually getting the attack to land, since your tank will have significantly worse chance to hit than a damage-oriented melee character. Both because of stat allocation, and because of the massive penalty incurred from wearing heavy armour. Even if you overcome that hurdle, you will not infrequently find that, for the enemies that matter, the target is immune to the effect. Note that the Master-level Warfare abilities might support this style better once you get there, but that's not available until Act 3. Which brings me to a bit of a rant. The seemingly arbitrary location of trainers. Now, there has always been an element of this in earlier Might and Magic games, but the new version makes it quite a bit worse due to the content gating. You have no way of knowing at the start, but a seemingly arbitrary choice of skill may end up crippling you for some time due to this. A glaring example is the Sword skill. Both Expert and Master trainers are fairly easily accessible during Act 1. The expert Spear trainer isn't even available until Act 2. My 18-might Crusader, mainly built for healing and wielding a *one-handed* sword, is-and-was comfortably outdoing my 40-might spear-wielding Barbarian. It's extra unfortunate because a simple solution would be simply removing the pointless gate that blocks access to the second town, Seahaven, during Act 1. I guess that technically makes another hint: don't take spears. Barbarians can GM two-handed maces and spears, so while in the long term it will end up even, you'll be suffering for a good portion of the early game.

I did end up digging the information up, no thanks to the devs and all thanks to Google. And with actual useful information in hand, set out anew. It's a bit unfortunate that the skill distribution is so narrow, such that for many skills there's only one choice of class available if you want to grandmaster it. And grandmastering generally makes a huge difference, potentially by a factor of two or even more. The most egregious is Dark Magic which can't even be learned at novice level by anyone but a Freemage. As a melee character, the only optimal choices are a dual wielding bladedancer or a two-hander barbarian because they're the only ones who can GM both the weapon and the supporting skill. That kind of thing.

Now that I'm reasonably familiar with the fundamental mechanics, it makes it all the more frustrating how poor nonexistent the game's documentation is. Want a listing of spells in each spell school? Nuh-uh. A summary table of what classes have access to what skill caps? Nope. A simple listing of what each hireling bonus actually is? Haha, no way. I've gone on about this before: I understand why we can't have extensive paper-based documentation any more. But for the love of god, make an effort to produce a reasonable substitute. Right now many devs cynically use digital distribution as a transparent excuse not to bother producing anything at all. EDIT: Another annoyance, though one hard to actually blame the devs for, is that the concept of Early Access games inevitably pollute the usual information sources with outdated information not relevant to the game when it is finally released. Not sure what the solution is, but it's going to be a problem with many more future games.

Yeah, the way the product page puts it, it reads more or less like a total squad tactics game - and assuming it is, I'll probably give it a miss since I'm a bit burnt out of tactical thinking post-XCOM.

It saddens me that every encounter is restricted to be an all-or-nothing affair. Aggro some enemies and you will kill them, or die trying. Even if you manage to get some space between you and them, they will pursue you forever, and you're locked out of interacting with anything, including, sadly, zone transitions. I led some enemies on a merry chase to the gates of Sorpigal - y'know, the gates that don't actually have doors on them and are always wide open - but nope, no entry. It's sad because my primary strategy in MM6/7 mainly involved running away in that fashion.