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Jarmo

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Everything posted by Jarmo

  1. Jarmo
    Original D&D had all elves be battlemages, full armor, full combat capabilities and spells. Balanced by slower level progression, lower max level and less hit points. D&D 3.0 and 3.5 can also make it work. ToEE particularly had those nifty elven chains that gave good AC and low spell failure. Take a couple of fighter levels and a whole bunch of wizard, works like charm. Fully buffed: dexterity, strength, AC and resistances through the roof, sword flaming and stoneskin for damage reduction, a fighter mage can go toe-to-toe with a fighter of similar level and can open up with a fireball! Totally awesome. But that's as long as the buffs have duration and as long as you can take 10 rounds to apply them before the fight. Fighter is ready from the get go and his strength doesn't disappear in a minute. In the end. A wizard + a fighter make for a more effective combo than two fighter mages. The wizard buffs up the fighter, stands back and lobs those high level spells. But a fighter mage can be more versatile and capable alone, than either a wizard or a warrior. Depending on stuff. Anyway. So far as I know, I like the wizard in plate thing PE seems to be offering.
  2. Jarmo
    But you don't have a problem with any of those. Do you. Nope, you just have a problem with the ones that can kill you. For the record, I have a problem with all of those. A stun that either doesn't affect you at all or puts you 100% out of commission. I'll much rather have states of stunnedness between 0-100%, with durations from a blink of an eye to minutes. Like hitting an attacking lion or a mugger with a taser. It's not like a certain percentage of either would be completely unharmed and a certain percentage would be knocked out. I'll much rather have something like "stun points" where you can put a big guy out of commission by slapping him several times, the combined effect doing the thing where the first strike fails. Also, from totally charmed, through grudgingly accepting some non-combat instructions, to totally resisting the charm. In increments. Get stung by a tiny scorpion or a cow-size wyvern. Poisons of different strengths. Not 20% chance to immediately die from first and 80% from the second, but varying states of "poisoned". Hold person. From totally held so hard you can't blink to slightly hindered or completely unaffected. 1-100% depending on stuff. What I don't have problems with, is effective insta-kill. So the demigod lich has a death ray, ok. Lets say, the ray does 10d6 points of damage, so it kills a war elephant in a couple of turns, or (likely) completely disintegrates a 1st level warrior. Heck, a halberd is effectively an insta-kill weapon if you're hitting a 1st level mage with 2 HP's! But it's not a throw saving throw against death (10% chance) and throw saving throw against death (70% chance) at 10th level.
  3. Jarmo
    Some fighter type with Divine Champion prestige makes for an excellent tank. Sacred defence gives +5 to all saves by 10th level. Melee characters are excellent in both NWN2 OC and MotB, there's plenty of crafting options to make insanely powerful weapons. (and I seem to recall the same was true for SoZ, but don't remember for sure) SoZ has a readily available nifty Druid companion with Raptor animal companion. Also at least a ranger, but I always took the druid. SoZ is great in that everybody gets to butt in in conversations, so you don't necessarily need a dedicated party leader, actually "the leader" mostly needs ranger skills, outdoorsman (or whatever it was), search, spot, hide and stuff like that. Sorcerer makes for a real nice spokesman, but there's a thing in that you almost completely need crafting skills and specific spells to make sweet items. So going with sorcerer either means limiting crafting, limiting combat effectiveness or planning ahead.
  4. Jarmo
    This and the original are the two I like the most so far. But anyways. The two things I'd mostly like to see are: 1. Floating help texts when hovering over UI element or stuff. So I can know if the sword is attack or sheathe weapons or what. 2. Right click-doing-stuff kind of things, ideally ToEE/NWN kinds of selection wheels. 3. Ability to quickslot actions and spells and whatever, and bind them to keystrokes. ("a" for attack, "****f-a" for power attack, "alt-a" for secondary attack) 4. Have keys mapped for the actions in the interface. And those are the four things I'd mostly like to see. Beside macros for multiple action sequences.
  5. Jarmo
    BTW. There was an NWN module called Hex Coda that allowed teleporting for the player and players team. Blink back to headquarters or call in new teammates whenever you feel like it. Totally awesome, didn't break anything (unless you call removing needless backtracking a valuable feature that gives more prescious duration to the adventure) Teleporting in one way or another was done in many modules and games, but never as well. I still miss the feature. Not only it didn't break the game, it gave new writing material for the author. No. Generally I really dislike writers taking the easy way out. Villain teleporting away despite you casting dimensional anchor on him. Because it was such a special teleport he's using. He and every damn teleporting enemy in the world. Special my butt. And yeah. If Sarevok has 95% of killing you with every blow while you have 95% chance of missing, and you need to land about 20 hits in a row, while he needs to miss 60 times in a row. Then yeah, give a game over and happily ever after for the player pulling the one in a billion. Pretty sure the player succeeding in that would be damn satisfied (and would then reload and do the game as intended).
  6. Jarmo
    In IE, in many of the small fights I'd group select all party members and click attack on nearest target. Mages and fighters alike. Having a couple of extra options wouldn't remove the use of tactics but rather increase it. While I could use the same tactic against a dragon, I wouldn't for obvious reasons.
  7. Jarmo
    From what I gather, fighter has unique fighting abilities other classes don't have. The abilities are just more hand to hand combat style than those of wizards. Though the magic for everybody is an interesting concept. RuneQuest had that and it worked out pretty great, although there it meant exactly that you couldn't really be a top notch kick ass fighter if you didn't know any magic. It actually does sound at this point, that a party of wizards (some more melee than others) would indeed be a viable, versatile choice. But remains to be seen how things balance out.
  8. Jarmo
    No idea if this is in, but it's a great idea! Likely there'll be many groups with at least two casters. Even more likely, many groups with multiple fighter types that can.. dunno.. ready for approach or something. So, a living interface which only shows the abilities that all selected types have?
  9. Jarmo
    BTW watched a neat documentary thingie on viking Ulfberht swords and making them. I think this is the same one: Finnish version http://areena.yle.fi/tv/1902929 Cool stuff all over. Didn't know nothing about this whole thing before. Damascus steel... dunno. Read something somewhere about there being nanotube-like structures in there. Quick google: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061116-nanotech-swords.html Anyway, it doesn't really matter if the swords were as good or better as todays tech allowes. The important thing is how good they were in comparison to other swords at the time. Which apparently was "pretty damn good". But how about the fabled Toledo Steel? Just good stuff or really something special in there? I could google it up, but then again, I should actually do some work now... :/
  10. Jarmo
    I had the same when I started. Then found someone claiming auto- and quicksaving can premanently corrupt a savegame. (The saves can corrupt anyway, so keeping multiple saves is pretty much a must). Anyway, avoiding those, I've still had a few crashes and an instance where game goes corrupt and every further save is corrupt. Reload an older save and off you go again. Frustrating stuff, but doable once you're in terms with how things go.
  11. Jarmo
    Do actually, and put on youtube. Start with 1 cm light spear pole and move up if that works. I'd love to know if it can be done. I'm leaning on sceptisism but I'd love to know. I have a new theory which says 2-h swordman would swipe at the pikes swaying them aside, then quick step forwards inside the pikes practical range, followed by reverse swipe at the pikemen. Chaos, mayhem, casualties, formation broken. Not necessary to break the pikes. As for, why use zweihander instead of say, halberd, I don't know. Something. Maybe a combination of durability and the ability to slash with all parts of the blade, meaning you can step inside halberds range?
  12. Jarmo
    Stuck at Warband again. a bit of 1257AD, which is still in eternal beta, it's the most complex and fully featured mod out there, yet it just doesn't work right.... Now having another go at Prophesy of Pendor. Fun in that particular soul numbingly repetitive grind kind of way. The most polished and fun to play mod of them all.
  13. Jarmo
    Cutting polearms. This is something I've been thinking of lately. Especially after viewing a youtube of sword vs spear sparring, where the guy with a spear had real, real big advantage all the time. Basically.. I can't see how it could be done. I've cut wood and yeah, I can chop a treebranch or a couple of cm thick tree easily enough with various woodcutting instruments like a handaxe or a ... vesuri.. umm.. bill? But hard dried wood, that's in someones hand, not stationary, and the somebody doesn't try to help me? Can't see how that works. But then.. it's so commonly depicted and I seem to recall that's a funcion of 2-h swordmen. But is it historical or just the movies or books? Breaking polearms, yeah. Overhand hit on hard surface and you'll need a real strong pole to not break it.
  14. Jarmo
    Yeah, juggling priorities when choosing a weapon. Swords and other light slashing weapons are ideal against unarmored or lightly armored opponents, quick strikes and effective parrying, but not effective against heavy armor. Axes are something like a half-way towards maces and hammers. Not as agile as a sword, not as effective against heavy armor as a hammer. But makes nasty cutting wounds unlike a mace and can penetrate light armor or do blunt trauma against heavy. Ditching the shield and taking a 2-handed weapon (or 2-handed grip) enables either faster & harder strikes, or effectively wielding a heavier or longer weapon. Knights started doing without shields and relied on armour for protection when plate started to become commonplace. Both because plate gave good enough protection, but also because they wanted to wield big enough weapons to hurt the other guy.
  15. Jarmo
    The setting is pretty simplistic old skool good vs evil throughout. But the game does get better! The first quests from the first village are pretty mundane stuff and the first real combat situations are cruelly difficult. Fighting the first major enemies near the first village is when things are getting interesting and combat gets awesome, with maybe 3th to 4th level, when you're already hitting more than missing. The main temple is a dungeon crawl and does lose focus here and there. The major battles are interesting, but then there's a lot of fluff, strange creatures to fight in this room, more stranger in next. In the original version the game level caps at 10th, making everything horribly difficult near the end, and meaning you wont gain any XP in the last couple of temple levels. Circle of Eight modpack fixes a ton of bugs optionally adds a lot of new content and removes the level cap.
  16. Jarmo
    The OP and a few of the later posts bring up many more thoughts. Like.. should shield offer protection against shrapnell or fireball? Terrain.. already offers protection from area effects in some silly action games like skyrim. People in front of you or your shield does not. Does the game (intend to) have mechanics to allow.. say a wall to block a fireball effect? Not that the game necessarily has fireball, but there'll be something similar anyway.. Dragon age didn't and that was a pretty sophisticated system, but area was area no matter the walls. If there's already a decision to not make terrain block effects, the characters shouldn't either. But if the terrain does block, the inclusion of characters blocking might not be impossible.
  17. Jarmo
    I can't believe either could actually be used to pierce through plate. Unless you count going for the joints and splits in the armor. Mail yeah, could probably go straight through less tight rings, maybe break a badly made ring. Well.. actually for estoc... maybe, just maybe... if the wielder is very strong and the plate is somewhat weak.
  18. Jarmo
    DA:O had good combat in early levels, but it became an uncontrollable mess later on. BG2 started out bad and only got worse, except when you got stuff like Gate and Summon Deva and could just hang back. Icewind Dale and 2 had good combat all the way. Dated (even then), but good. Final Fantasy XIII (or was it XII) had great triggers and automations, with stuff like heal if at under x%health, you could pretty much program the thing and leave the group fighting by themselves. (But no terrain or stuff like that, just folks standing in line bashing each others)
  19. Jarmo
    In theory I'd be all over it, but actually I can't see the use. In first thought, having inventory and maps and journals and stuff on the other monitor sounds fine. But I assume invoking the inventory pauses the game, so.. either the side screen would be empty and then the inventory pops there when called for, or the inventory stays open in the side all the time and multimonitor users are at disadvantage of having to manually pause. Or maybe a side monitor could show a view of the action at different zoom level? But even that, I'm not sure it'd be real advantage or benefit, worth the effort. What I'm trying to say, there'd need to be real advantage, not just support multi-monitor setups for the sake of supporting them.
  20. Jarmo
    I'd be wary of taking too much effort into making sure summoning isn't too powerful (=making sure playing summoner isn't fun). NWN2 and 3.5 went there with the summon useless crap for a blink of an eye, only one summon per party. NWN1, a dire badger at 1st level was nice help, but things went downhill from there. But at least those stayed for a decent time. BG2 had it best, though there was no balance. First it's semi-useless meat shields, then you can summon a pit fiend and can start hanging back. But it was fun dammit! Rarely if ever, has crpg combat been as satisfying as when sending a pit fiend into a beholder lair and listening the carnage from a safe distance. But please. No summoning animals or orcs or stuff like that. At least without giving a thought to where those come from. If I summon a goblin or a bandit, is he gone from some village and do they get the body back in 29 seconds? Make it illusionary forms, or spirits, or magical planar creatures like imps or elementals or litl' devils.
  21. Jarmo
    I think that's a byproduct of 3.5 & 4E which Sawyers seems to be drawing a lot of inspiration from. Everyone can do everything with little to no efficiency drop off. Make that "Everyone can do everything, although with some efficiency drop off" and it'll likely be more accurate. To me, it's like thinking of a special forces team. It's not like nobody but the medic can apply a bandage, or that the scout is the only one who can sneak. Specialists do it best, but anyone with a scoped rifle can do a passable job as a sniper.
  22. Jarmo
    Monk concept seems fine and sweet to me. Just give them a higher level ability to change their fist like unto a thing of iron, and I'm all set.
  23. Jarmo
    There's just not enough of tidy & neat wars these days. Where an army meets another in a field and the outcome determines the outcome. The war is concluded, the issue out of the table, everybody's happy again. Not only these days either, there never was, but still! And yea, the nations willingness to continue fighting is important. Not important enough if the other side rolls you over like a wet pancake, but important anyway. Bit stunning, how Soviets in WW2 had an army of about 5 million, and took about 20 million casualties, killed or wounded. Basically losing the whole army every year and then some! Still kept going and won. Much the same as Romans vs Hannibal.
  24. Jarmo
    As long as one doesn't go silly with the argument. The weaker force is expected to lose, thus has more opportunities to defy the odds, thus has better chance of winning. I'd rather suggest the obvious alternative, wars are mostly won by winning battles with superior forces, as expected, catching no-one off guard. Rather, good stories and legendary battles are born when the weaker force, calculated to lose, wins against superior forces. And even then, it's mostly because the calculation is done badly (usually discounting the quality difference between forces) and then exaggerating the numbers difference.. -- Which brings me to one point I've been thinking about recently. Are there any legendary heroic generals/commanders that got their fame by winning with superior numbers against superior quality? ... ehh.. zulus.. but.. hmmm...
  25. Jarmo
    I'd just like to share that every time I see the post I first read it as "what should female breast really look like" and kind of get flashbacks to how/what the rpg scene looked like a few years back. Guess it's not all different and great even now, but I digress for the digression. No point here, move along...
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