KingNee

I suggest a much safer game, something like "Limbo" should be right up your alley. (I kid, you should probably stay away from that one.)

Dragon Aids: In Position

I want one of those soul armors as a companion. Preferably with a geeky personality that gets really upset when teased and wrecks faces. Oh, and he writes fan-fiction and you can stalk his in-game idols.

Got the "unpaid" bug as well, it seems like an UI error and not a mechanical one. What's a mechanical bug is when you auto-resolve and get your buildings trashed even when the attacking army is utterly insignificant. A manual resolve had them dead in 20 seconds with little to no input from my own team.

I have a high security rating, Ogre and all that stuff, still they managed to destroy 4(!) buildings in one auto-resolved attack. I figured "screw that" and reloaded for a manual resolve, they died in 20 seconds without much input from my team. So yeah...this stuff needs some work.

Remember that this was pretty much a Baldur's Gate homage, at least heavily inspired by it. I think you'll want to play Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is more of a Planescape Torment homage, for the real heavy dialogue goodness. I know I will.

Great review.

I used Gaun's Share on my main but the flail physics were distracting, they look like limp.. biscuits... instead of the fearsome weapons that they are.

Alas, if only I too could possess such restraint.

I don't agree, you have to take ease of use into account. Fireball is much easier to use and thus spam so it should have heavily moderated damage as a direct cause. Fan of flames might legitimately be overpowered but I haven't used it much because of its range. I have to disagree. Wizards can only cast each level of spells 4 times. That's a heavy limitation, which means I'm going to want to get the absolute most out of every single spell. Using a weak spell because it's slightly easier to use isn't something I'm going to do. I'm either going to hold onto that spellcast for another time, or I'll spend the effort setting up proper positioning. There are a ton of fights in the game where you don't get to properly position, are you gonna use fan of flames when ambushed? Most likely not, unless you like to roast your own crew.

Same, I thought I would have issues with it but didn't. It's also more true to the roleplaying aspect of not having to kill absolutely everything in sight.

I don't agree, you have to take ease of use into account. Fireball is much easier to use and thus spam so it should have heavily moderated damage as a direct cause. Fan of flames might legitimately be overpowered but I haven't used it much because of its range.

It's basically the extent of the AI targeting priorities; IF NOT "wizard" THEN attack nearest, ELSE bum-rush! (unless ranged)

I found the Integration of the Stronghold in Neverwinter Nights 2 (also by Obsidian) to be superb, so I don't think that the mechanic as a whole was a bad thing to include in PoE. I'ts just lacking a bit of refinement in my opinion. While there are many things they could have done to make it better immersion-wise, I feel the game would have been much better without it. It's a tacked on thing right now, like a free to play mobile game with actions every x hours, none of them mattering. NWN (of which I remember only really enjoying MOTB) had a much stronger focus on building up that fortress and it worked much better there. Still I prefer games where your environment fits your circumstances, where the urgency of your quest will leave no room for such tomfoolery. I know that some of the greats had tongue in cheek random encounters but they were not a big part of the game, you didn't see the knights who say "NI" on every street corner.

The stronghold definitely is an immersion breaker. They committed to putting it in and racked their brains how to integrate it in any meaningful way and came up short.(and I don't blame them) This game is a CONTENDER, it's playing with the big boys of RPG history. There's no place for facebook games. We have children being drowned because they are born without souls while you're hanging out in your blinged out stronghold, texting your friends to upvote your new fountain. This and all the YOLO tombstones have no place in a contender, but they promised these features very early in development when they might have looked good on paper. They weren't good ideas, they know that now, I guarantee it.

Let's be fair, I'd be annoyed too if I couldn't walk.

Eventually you'll have multiple grimores that you can swap in between fights (or during a fight, with some delay) to extend spell use on your mage before having to rest. I haven't gotten too terribly far either, so I can't really comment on how awesomely damaging (or not) wizard spells may be, but I haven't been super impressed with the ones up to lvl 5. Not that that is terribly surprising or anything, low level spells. And I have played some games with some friendly fire aspects that I didn't mind/didn't bother me. Just not liking it in PoE at the moment. Just to let you know that swapping spell books doesn't give you extra spell per rest. IE. It won't extend spell use on your mage before having to rest. At least it doesn't do it for me. I think that would be OP anyway. We could have 10 spell books. Correct, it gives you more spells to choose from (with the downside being the delay when switching books) but it doesn't give you more actual spell casts / rest.

Slicken + Fireball to the face. Add more fireball until they stop twitching. That said, I agree with the OP. It's not so much that I don't think they can do damage, they can do lots of it later on, but they're just not very fun to play. Almost all their spells have friendly fire, many of them involve shooting stuff in a straight line right through your defensive guys, tons of spells that require you to basically walk within touching distance of the enemy to use them( these are enemies that can one shot you and will do so) There's no place for no range spells in there except hard disengage. Battles need to be micromanaged every second or they're just one big mosh pit cluster**** where mages die immediately. The AI beelining for the wizard every time and the poor pathfinding are just issues that add to the problem. In BG one wizard with a lot of defensive spells could keep you busy for several minutes, here you run up and knock them over and then kick them in the shins until they're dead.

Yes, currently no reason to bother with traps imho. 1 Trap is not gonna make enough of a difference in a proper fight. I hope they change this.

Thanks, that's a bummer. I thought I had some use for all the traps my rogue is picking up but 1 trap / encounter that's useless.

Can someone confirm that you can only have one friendly trap active at a time?

same

I turned off the pig and went for the dog. Much nicer. The pig is distracting.

....Aaaaand it's cancelled.