Ichthyic

they used a rather strange notation. I believe the idea is that it's not payday yet. on payday, they say "paid", then the day after, they are "unpaid" again. really, it should only say "unpaid", if you are literally broke and unable to pay them, forcing you to let them go, or have them take up a spot on your force while doing nothing. don't know if this is changed in the new patch or not, but I'm guessing the keep is pretty low on the priority list atm. bottom line? don't worry about what it says unless you really ARE entirely out of money.

Hmm. had my keep for a couple of levels of experience now, cleared out the first level of the endless tunnels, built a little over half of all the possible upgrades (just to see what was possible). my conclusion? someone saw "Money Pit", the movie, and decided to make it into content for this game. seriously, someone is VERY AFRAID that players will actually make the *tiniest* scrap of money from this apparently, since everything you can do with it costs HUGE sums of money, which realistically would take many many weeks of in game play to earn even to do basic upgrades. taxes? actually, even with 25 security, bandits take MORE MONEY THAN TAXES BRING IN! this not only is ridiculous, it should not even be possible! so, before I started hacking in extra bucks just to see where this would go, this keep ended up costing me an average of about 3k per week of gametime. frankly? that 3k would be far far better spent on equipment, or ingredients, or rest bonuses at inns, or any myriad of other things. building up even more (can't see how you would even do this before nearly the end of the game without cheating) does not end up making the keep produce money for you. basically, it is little more than a money pit, which you can spend many thousands on to get early access to things you can spend many MORE thousands on (and you don't even get a discount, even though IT'S YOUR KEEP). so, while I really like the idea of the keep, and there are some excellent roleplaying aspects to it, it simply costs wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much money as it stands right now. -Have it generate taxes in a sane fashion, and have bandits RANDOMLY take some of that (not always!) only if you basically have very low security AND haven't bothered to hire some mercenaries to protect your keep. as it is, even with 25 security, and 7/8 mercenaries hired.... a bog standard bandit raid results in the death of one or two mercs, 200cp in damage, and usually a destroyed upgrade! that's bloody ridiculous. If you manually take care of it, the bandits are like swiss cheese, and easily wiped out, and you lose no buildings... yet they STILL take all of your taxes, and then some?? wtf? -all upgrades should cost exactly HALF of what they do now. money is tight for the first half of the game, and by the time you have enough money to do significant upgrades, many of those upgrades will no longer really be useful. -more frequent adventures, that turn purely based on gametime, and not quest completions. don't mind the pathetic rewards, but at least make them more frequent. -so far I have had 4 visitors. only one of those was a "good" visit, and it happend the first day I owned the keep, and had no barracks built yet to hire him. all the others have been negative visits, and have forced me to pay them off or suffer consequences... either way, again, more money lost. delay visitors until the keep is built up enough for the player to actually be able to do something about them (hire them, or whatever). allow your hire mercenaries to deal with them if you do not have a player character available (probably because they are on an infrequent adventure). -have merchants in your keep give you BETTER than average prices for the goods they sell; call it a tax for them even being ABLE to do business in your keep. -decrease the frequency of raids, and make it so only very large raids even have a chance of destroying your buildings. overall, whoever was so afraid this keep might actually make a player a few coppers a week? get over yourself, really. you went way overboard trying to prevent it, and it makes zero sense as it stands.

I'd rather devs all go back to the way it used to be for patch distribution: you downloaded a patch straight from the developer. this distributing hotfixes and patches through retail outlets is just inane. Think about it.... did you ever get patches for you older games through the store you bought the game at? no, you downloaded them from the developer.

I got the same. experience and cash. the items you rip off the corpses of your bounties, would be my guess. the troll in the forest one nets you a ton of rare materials for example.

that sounds like a very fun alternative build.

I like the quest robes from the castle in act 1 (berathian priest robes) they look nice, they are unique, and they have 2 damage reduction base with only 5% speed penalty... the way a robe should be. they are also entirely enchantable, and you can have up to 6 of them. perfect caster gear IMO. they do have ONE problem though... they weren't properly designed to be worn with capes; you'll find capes will clip into your back if you wear one while wearing this robe. edit: I decided to take a closer look... and it turns out that I think the robes are set to the sex of your main character. so the reason they clip with a cape when wearing them on a male character, is because likely, like me, your main character is a female, so actually the game puts a dress on your male character.... and it causes some clipping issues. I'd call that a bug, but they have a lot more bugs than that to deal with first.

IIRC, that drops from the Spider Queen in the dungeon under your keep. she's in the SW corner I think, in the level under where the prison cells are. which means you can get it pretty much as soon as you get your keep. she isn't too tough.

interesting. I rather love Durance. I tend to start EVERY fight with him using painful interdiction on the group I'm about to fight. it pretty much gives me a free turn. his buffs are awesome at protecting your team from taking damage (the level 2 spell), making your team do way MORE damage (bless plus the critical spell at level 3), and priests have several relatively fast lockdown spells to take opponents out fo the fight for a while. even have some good low level direct damage spells. I actually very rarely use Durance to heal; what with all the healing potions and scrolls you find/buy/make. now that both ice fog and grease are getting seriously nerfed, I can't imagine running without a priest for the disablers and knockdowns they have.

The main problem with them is that they break one of the fundamental conventions of CRPGs - that those people who are unimportant don't get names and that characters with names should be talked to if possible. In other words, that unimportant background characters whose main job is to be there such that a setting doesn't seem unpopulated are, at the same time, clearly distinguishable such that players don't waste time on interacting with them. By giving them names, even if with a different backlight, you are indicating to players that these are important and should be talked to as. To make it worse, it requires your very special soul reading ability and plays a sound and graphic effect when you do it, you know, just like that very important event right at the start of the game. Players who don't start out knowing that it is a waste of time unless you want to read flavour stories that are irrelevant to the setting and to the game's story are going to spend a lot of time reading/skimming them and activating soul reading just in case this next one is the one that actually does something. Eventually they will eventually learn it, but even then it adds to the time it takes for a player to get a quick view of who are important in a given setting, because the mind is much better at automatically sorting people by whether they have generic names that appear all over the place, like four commoners next to each other, or unique names, than by sorting them by whether their names have one backlight or another. It is a completely different issue with tombstones/testimonials. Those are normally used in CRPGs to list jokes, silly verse, RIPs, and real world references and not to provide useful information except in the cases where there's a specific mission to find some useful information on a tombstone, and they aren't spread out everywhere but collected in a few locations. Fleshing out the game with named characters that are utterly irrelevant to the plot instead of just adding a bunch more generic people with professions rather than names was, as far as I am concerned, a bad idea where gameplay is concerned. It helped rake in the money, though, so there is that. It just makes for an ever so slightly worse game. I totally agree. I came to this game unaware of its Kick Starter history. As I started playing I saw these yellow NPC's and figured I was using my plot related power in some plot advancing way. I thought maybe looking into peoples souls (or w/e) would be linked to the game some way (side quests, future events, what have you). I read a lot of the back stories until I just got bored of it (it was honestly rather boring to read so much about so little). After reading this thread, and finding out what they really are, I am rather sad I wasted my time with this. And they always stand out to me because I like running with tab on to see what is intractable, and now that I know they are backers its a bit, I don't know, off putting I guess. I really would not mind having them hidden or something. You know what you should do next? Visit all the cemetaries in the game and read every grave stone! there is a puzzle hidden in some of the gravestone texts, and once you put it together, it tells you where to look for a hidden stash.

Ah, but which will give him the most satisfaction? I find it rather disturbing that people even CAN feel satisified by killing an in game NPC.... that's some pretty irrational hate.

not from your own numbers. +2 better deflection, but loses 17 in comparison to all other defenses? uh, buddy, that means the pally wins hands down on the defense front. cobine that with shielding flames, for another +10 deflection... to everyone... plus the outworn buckler, that only palys can use, and adds ANOTHER plus 5 defense... to everyone during combat. plus auras. sorry, but no, the paly is the better defensive tank. people who are saying the fighter is better are just wrong. the ONLY thing the fighter has going for it is that it can aggro one more enemy at a time than the paly can. that's it really. I've had eder with me since level 2, and even though he has 17 might, and a better weapon than mine, and should be attacking faster than my tanky paladin.... I see my paly still has more overall damage tallied from using the flames of devo ability all the time... and that's a paly PURELY designed as a tank, with only 11 might (and that from bonuses).

heavy armor slows priests down too much IMO. they can boost their own defenses, but why? when they can cast such nice buffs and damaging spells. if you want to make them less squishy, give them a shield, but I rarely have the problem that my priest is getting hit. Chanters, OTOH, are not affected by heavy armor at all (at least for their chants), so giving a chanter plate armor works just fine. they will attack slower, but you're relying mostly on their chants and invokes anyway so....

supposedly, the idea is to use the blunderbus for low armor targets, and the arquebus for high armor targets. I found the pistol to shoot noticeably faster than the arquebus, so I used it on characters I actually wanted to have keep shooting during a fight. used the arquebus on characters I expected would only take one or two shots in any given fight, like my priest.

just did the dweller at level 5 on hard. that's a good matchup; good challenge. requires good tactics, spacing. will definitely test your team build, as well as making sure you aren't just doing say... slashing damage.... try to pick around the edges of the group first, and you can probably take out 2 or three of them before the rest go aggro on you. After that... keep the dweller locked down entirely, through abilities, spells, what have you, or you'll regret it if he gets off a crit doing his aoe attack. priests come in very handy in this battle, for both offense and defense. but overall, like I said, decent challenge, but nothing overwhelming really, unless you get really unlucky or make more than one or two mistakes. I took some good damage, but nothing I felt was going to take my team out I guess my point is... I don't think you need to wait until high levels before doing some of these.

It took a few hours of playing before I got used to how this game paces itself, and how you have to lead your targets with spells and whatnot, but now that I'm used to it, I find the pacing to be decent enough. I DO however think that effects like "hobbling", whether from a rogue skill cripple, or from a web spell, should slow enemies 50% more than it does. especially now that the new patch makes spells like grease only have a single knockdown attack per cast. to compensate, the game provides you with nearly endless places where you can bottleneck your foes, put up a tank wall, and pummel your opponents that way. but I do think I still prefer open tactical combat a bit more... and the way to fix that is to have abilities that slow your opponents actually have a more significant impact on their movement speed. it would be a very easy thing to mod as well, should the devs have their own reasons for not wanting to do that. in fact, post patch 1.04 (the one after this one coming up), modding spells is probably the first thing I would be looking at.

I just now, after playing until I hit level 5, realized that you can roll your mouse over your attack that is listed in the battle statistics window... and it will show you EXACTLY all the rolls you made, the defenders rolls against, and what damage and disabilities you did to your target, in detail. this... is... awesome. the battle statistics window is not cluttered; i can easily scroll through it to find a specific attack, and just roll over it to see if I need to adjust my tactics. very, very cool. just wanted to mention that.

bonus.

^^what an inane response. here's a better one: to me, this makes wizards even WEAKER than they already were at lower levels. they basically had 3 spells at level one that made them viable to include in your party. now two of them are nerfed beyond usefulness. grease has ALWAYS been a save-every-turn kind of spell, in every game it has ever been used in. this will be the first game, EVER, to make grease a one-time knockdown effect. it was already short duration, already checked against a defense score, there was no need to nerf it. nerfing chill fog to last half its current duration would be good, but it too didn't really need a nerf. basically, I say you can now just leave the wizard in your stronghold until you hit level 8, then create a custom one if you want to use one. otherwise, there is little to recommend in playing a wizard now. i've not at all been impressed with either their control abilities, or their damage output. fireball does pathetic damage. lightning is near uncontrollable indoors, and also does low damage. you still have paralyze at least, but that makes you a one trick pony. all of the other offensive spells level 3 or below have ranges so short, your mage inevitably runs into the middle of a melee to cast them. meh. this is the first old-school rpg I have ever played where I felt like wizards were simply outclassed by pretty much every other class, except paladin maybe.

yup, use kana's chant that increases reload speed (currently bugged so it actually DOUBLES your ranged attack rate!) and all of a sudden, that arquebus is a very brutal weapon indeed.

confirmed. it's an instaneous interrupt effect. I haven't noticed it doing much, other than causing enemies to pause briefly. I still include it in my chant regimen though. speed reload/frighten/speed reload. good for things you want to hit with ranged attacks. combined with something like painful interdiction, grease, and web, you can keep enmies from hitting you while you rapidly pummel them.

you mean you tried hard to make it work... offensively. for shieldbearers... this is a DEFENSIVE skill. it's far, FAR better than lay on hands. why? shielding flames is the very first upgrade, which gives you +10 deflection, for ALL your party members, every time you use your flames ability, which you can do twice per combat. that makes it beat hands... hands down. don't know how you missed that, unless all you did was look at how to exploit flames offensively.

too many people seem to miss that shieldbearers get a great upgrade to flames called "shielding flames". whenever you use your flames attack, everyone in your party gets +10 deflection. that's better than the lay on hands buff, hands down. plus... you get to do it twice per combat. though, this is specifically for a tanky pally build, not a generalist.

I did a elven ranged rogue with blind, cripple, marksman, distant advantage and weapon focus: peasant. using hunting bow enchanted fine with burn. crits near constantly, and combined with her abilities, or with things from the others like web or any of the other hobbling type aoe spells, she gets sneak attacks on pretty much every attack. using padded armor, max dex then might. by far and away does the most damage of any of my characters. by the end of level 4, she had accrued 7k total damage. disables traps (important on hard difficulty and above) and picks locks. uses scrolls as warranted up to level 2. very viable, low risk.

actually, the deflection bonus upgrade you get to flames of devotion is superior to the lay on hands one, AND it applies to everyone in your party, not just the person you laid hands on. frankly, you don't need lay on hands. there are tons of healing abilities, spells, potions, scrolls, etc. but there is no substitute for flames of devotion/shielding flames. +10 deflection to everyone, twice per combat, is better than +8 to one person, once per combat. Only for shieldbearers though.

have you done the interdiction talents yet? those are quite good. interdiction/painful interdiction a really nice hobbler to start off a fight with. and the same with radiance radiance/brilliant radiance a nice finisher that heals your allies at the same time. bonus spells are good if you have already done the above. done all that (well, obviously for later levels...) then for roleplaying you might try scion of flame or inspired flame. both are handy, if not as good as the other bonuses mentioned. inspired flame makes him a beast with an arquebus from the back row when he's not casting, and you can give him a sword and shield for when he needs some protection, and he'll be able to hit something with them to boot.