Jarmo

Judging from the screens, both sets of equipped weapons are visible, but I'm not sure if you can actually "holster" the currently used weapon. The spare set on back I noticed, and it's great. Now it's more about if we can not hold weapons in ready to kill stance when wondering about in towns and bars. I'd expect that to be a rather common case, assuming the the characters do have ranged weapons. Simply select the ones that do and hit swap. Having all have ranged on the same slot.. well it'd make sense to have them so, if you can group swap. I don't see how requiring less actions instead of more, wouldn't be a good design. No need to have a special UI button if there's not one already in place. Just use the same button/key you'd use on single character, just make it apply for all selected characters.

Which would be real nice. Also, holster all weapons with one click. If that made it into the game, did it?

Oh, if the difficulty can be adjusted at will during the game, I'll start with normal. I'm mostly worried of sudden spikes, like a demigod endboss I can't beat with the party that had no problems until the last huge no turning back after this moment pit. Final Fantasy VII syndrome. And I want the difficulty to spike! Much better than for every drunken kobold to give god/weakling level of resistance, depending on selected difficulty.

Easy(ish). I do want the game to keep me on my toes, but I don't like repeating long battles. Generally speaking, I'd prefer not to die or reload once, kind of a soft pampered ironman mode. By what I've heard so far, with PoE I'll take the lowest difficulty available.

Pistols as part of hussar equipment or in general use by others? Because that was one notable thing I liked about them in Warband: With Fire and Sword. While others had firearms, hussars just had their lances and those crazy piercing swords, or sabers. Might have been a game design limitation, with the 4 slot system and all.

Hmm...earliest I know of is about 17th century, but they may well have been around a bit before then. Just came across this in Byzantine History Google+ group. Nice one-pager, even if there's nothing new and there's still a weird 500 year gap in grenade usage. http://www.thethoughtspot.net/lessonsinhistory/2014/6/28/early-history-of-the-hand-grenade Oh, and a way nice photo from crimean war. ... sigh, which I apparently can't post here because of reasons.

Guess I'll add to the noise as well. Yeah, I'm disappointed in the decision to go digital with the documentary. Especially as it appears I did chip at a physical tier entitling me to the disc. It's not the end of the world, I didn't even remember what tier I was in before taking a look. I wonder how many of those thinking it's no big deal or a non issue were those selecting a digital download anyway? If it turns out the cloth map production runs late, is it also ok to swap that to a digital cloth map? For myself, I wouldn't mind waiting a couple of months more for the box. I'm not sure, but I think the tier included a digital version anyway. Maybe add one to compensate for the delay? You see, my take is, if it looks you fail to deliver, it's better to over- than undercompensate. Better business in the long run even. To the talk of extra postal costs. It's incredibly narrow to now start viewing the backers giving in at about $200 apiece as an unnecessary cost, as if they're some needy parasites about to ruin obsidian with their needy demands. When the backers have specifically selected a physical reward tier and paid for the delivery (tier +$20). Ok, so maybe a lot of backers want the thing early, maybe some can't download. You just can't please everybody, but you can try a bit! And yeah, maybe the extra thing is totally sweet. And maybe it's a case of not delivering what someone wants, instead giving something he doesn't and calling it a day.

In all "build your own party" games, IWD, ToEE, whatever. I tend to do one of two things, either I try to play the game and come up with a super-optimized offbeat party (like... can you overwhelm everything if you have 6 rangers with 6 heavy hitter animal companions? worth a try) Or I build a thematic party, with a story. Like a Priest with two or more paladin companions. And then they'll have a hired rogue/wizard.

Yeah, anything like that would work. Though I always prefer if the hint comes from within the game universe, not a wink wink nudge nudge message from the developers. Much best if the fourth wall is left alone most of the time. But anything rather than nothing. Popping in now and then to see if anything has changed is just about as silly as talking to everybody in a new town, pressing them hard to see if they have any parental issues or skeletons in a corner.

I'd rather expect to get some kind of a hint when it's time to go see. Say, I assume at the end of chapter 1 we've settled on the stronghold. Would make sense that "makes the news", a bunch of people know where you are now. So.. a message arrives with "you helped our village with kobold threat, now we have trolls!", or something to that effect. And then when get to the village, you also notice the crying lady in front of the crashed house and the traveler who's wagon has lost a wheel, again. And things work out from there...

I'll just add that whenever I play a thieving rogue in any rpg (and that mostly means one of the hundred NWN or NWN2 modules I've played), it feels really rewarding if there's something around there somewhere I can steal. Respectively, if I play rogue and none of the homes in game can be entered and none of the shops can be looted, I feel a bit cheated. Its basically the same as playing with a bard, and there never is a situation where you can actually play music or entertain. Yeah, it's an MMORPG era, I'm not actually playing a rogue, I'm playing DPS. I'm not playing a bard, I'm playing a walking buff. Arcanum was pretty great about this. You could pool your points into thieving skills early on and completely loot the inventory of the first village shop. But then you needed all that extra stuff because you hadn't put the points in fighting abilities. Of course, when the same shopkeeper happily buys back his inventory without suspecting a thing, something breaks. And the balance of the game was all broken anyway. But I didn't mind, I don't really care about the balance much anyway.

Meaningless to talk about mechanics in this stage, when the game is already feature locked. But meaningless talk is fun, so lets anyway. This "rob a kings ransom worth of loot from poor village smith" would tie in nicely with another mechanism discussed earlier. The shops, smiths and whatever wouldn't have 75 sets of full plate on store at any given time, or much else either. They'd have some items, not all that much, readily available. And then they'd have sources. So the village smith can make a set low quality chainmail, payment maybe half in advance, delivery in a week. Or the village shopkeeper can place an order to a big town for some rare items, payment in advance, delivery in a week. You can rob them, but they don't have all that much in store at any given time.

I'd like to see how that turns out as well. I'm willing to bet it won't work at all as such. The enemy will rush in and shred your hairy pistoleros. Having all sorts of characters be viable, doesn't quite equate with all tactics are viable. Now, if the barbarians open up with a volley taking down the enemy caster, and then proceed with greataxes, daggers and stuff. That's another thing. Pretty sure a part of party will needs to melee & hold the line, while others can play support. Maybe you can have melee wizards and support them with pistolero barbarians, but I'm pretty sure one can't just choose to not fight hand to hand if the enemy rushes in.

Did I already mention Byzantine Military History Facebook group has been full of real awesome pics of late. Like this one, which I probably fail to post because facebook is like eeevil.

IIRC, Morrowind and Oblivion merchants worked in a way, where you stole a potato from someones desk, then very quickly ran to the other town halfway across the continent and tried to sell it. And the merchant goes all like "trying to sell me a stolen potato, I'm not buying a stolen potato from a goddamn filthy thief!" Yup, it's Herbert Woodpeckers potato, I'd recognize it anywhere. A good potato, that one. But yeah. I agree with the sentiment of OP. Lootable merchants, no ludicrous amounts of items. No saggy pants minor village merchants with eleventy billion lunars worth of stuff but only 8 lunars of cash to buy stuff with. No stupid as hell trade mechanism where you buy stuff at base- and sell at 2 percent value. Buying at 100% and selling at 50% would be fine baseline, maybe 125%-25 if your stupid and ugly, 75%-75% if you're a super-salesman.

Probably a fighter with a pollaxe (or in case of absence, some other big hacking instrument) and some sort of heavy duty firearm. Though I'll have to see how well a rogue could work with those, giving even greater versatility. Companions. Whoever I happen to like the most and feel a good fit for the main character. (Cadegund and Pallegina are probably a match)

Depends. If the game is built like a road trip and you're not assumed to go back, then no reason really why there should be extra content later on. But if the game is more like "adventures in a living world" kind of thing, it's a lot more living if places don't turn into frozen in time zombietowns after you've done all the relevant quests. New Vegas. Primm. No reason to go back, though it would have been fun to go tell them not to worry about powder gangers anymore since I've deadified all of them. (maybe also warn them every place is now crawling with cazadores and stuff, sorry for leveling up) Generally, I like it when there's a reason to go back somewhere and the place has changed a bit since the events.

Hmm...earliest I know of is about 17th century, but they may well have been around a bit before then. They were black and spherical with fuses - a bit like the cartoon bomb we generally see in Loony Tunes animations (you know, the ones that don't actually kill you but just leave you charred a bit and then you're totally fine in the next scene :D ). I know that they had grenadiers in the 18/19th centuries. They also had things like Greek Fire, and Chinese rockets, in the medieval period. Pyrotechnics have been weaponised for a long time, but like everything else, it was refined and perfected over the years. That appears to be a thing historians are pretty unsure about. Or maybe they are sure but drowned by internet thought pollution. Firebombs are certainly around well before AD 1000, maybe before AD 800. Incidentally, flamethrowers were around earlier than that even. But when did the arabs pick that up and are their naptha bombs the same as byzantine greek fire? Gunpowder was used by the chinese in the same era, certainly against the mongols in 1200 or so, but did the mongols pick it up and use in the west? Dunno. And did they have actual grenade type weapons? Dunno either. Here's a pic where mongols supposedly use bombs against japanese in their invasion attempt: But is that a grenade?

...... so when ... are .... we .... going.... to...... ??????

Oh I wouldn't doubt they can be effective, even very effective in the right hands. But in RPG's the player can (usually) see and evaluate the actual numbers, and when one weapon type is just less effective than another, it tends to be avoided. Like staffs in D&D, you can pool in all the feats and it's just not a very good choice for a weapon. Spear is another D&D example, historically it was used a lot but in D&D it's simply a bad choice. And RPG creators, especially creators of combat oriented CRPG's, don't like to give choices that are just bad. So then you come up with monk classes and stuff, where fighting barehanded is suddenly a viable tactic. Or you give special attacks to staffs, the kind you can't do in any other weapon, to give a reason to pick a staff. And then I'm all unhappy because it hurts my brain when you can do a staff-super-spin-combo, but can't do that with a spear because of no good reason except game balance.

The problem I'd have with quarterstaves is the same as with unarmed combat. There are reasons why no army ever decided to adopt staffs or karate as their main offense weapons. They're just not as effective as something with a bit more cutting edge. A spear does pretty much everything, a staff does, and then some. Then again, even if there are no weapons allowed areas, the authorities are not likely to grab away your hands or walking sticks. And also, it's easier to bludgeon someone to submission with staffs or fists than by stabbing them with a stiletto. Which is probably why many police forces have been relying on blunt sticks a lot more than daggers. So yeah, I'd like to see staffs well treated in RPG's, but most likely wouldn't use them myself in a combat oriented CRPG.

After seeing some fan made NWN modules with a lot of people in cities, all of them named, all having something little to say. I have changed my opinion and hope there's not an endless variety. Preferably some solution where only the important people are named, the rest being "townsmen", "townswoman" and "traveler" and whatever. I've grown too old and impatient to appreciate the rewarding exploration, where you talk to everybody without reason, barge in their homes and ask if they happen to have rats in the basement or whatever. Especially if it's a city of ten thousand inhabitants.

I think, back in the day a caddy was called a squire.

That targe and shield reminds me... One thing which is a rather teeny bit late to point out now, is how weapons and armor adopted, is not in isolation of the probable opponents. So a country that's mostly fighting light skirmishers probably wouldn't wield super heavy armor or weapons designed to combat pierce heavy armor. While a frontier village where the significant threat is attacks by wyverns and trolls, would probably use stuff that's effective against them, halberds, spears and stuff, not likely flimsy dueling swords. Not sure how this works in Poe, I hope it does but usually fantasy worlds don't pay much attention to stuff like that.

The newish ipad iphone version? My hat's off to you. The style is the same but I'm sure I haven't seen any of those in any of my plays.