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Re: Difficulty way, WAY, to high

PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2020 10:18 pm
by Moddan
The solution for the spider queen puzzle was for me:

1. pre-casting silence where the queen and her magic entourage will appear in the 2nd wave, so she has to use her less deadly silenced spells
2. using a scroll of marilith(i had 3 scrolls at that time) and summon it next to the queen. it's 25 attacks stripped her off mirror image in one go
3. let my drake fighter grapple and pin(i had 90% chance!) her majesty while the others chopped her into bits. she was helpless. fighters rule with all the feats.

I'm sure there are other solution as well but the grappling weakness surprised me a lot. Focus on the caster in the last wave and block the other with summons/control spells.

Re: Difficulty way, WAY, to high

PostPosted: Thu Aug 27, 2020 12:50 am
by tdunaj
This fight is a motherfucker. I have been on this for a month now and have had enough. I give up.

Re: Difficulty way, WAY, to high

PostPosted: Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:29 am
by Moddan
I just won the gate battle with zero losses if not for that last monster standing, an ogre magus. he decided to crash the game. i would have done the same.

*edit
that was with 1.04. i just downloaded 1.05 and made it on the 2nd try. no crashes, good job.

Re: Difficulty way, WAY, to high

PostPosted: Mon Sep 14, 2020 11:07 pm
by Yankee
This game's difficulty is just perfect, Age Of Decadence style.
For those who find it too high, there are several options making it much easier: faster leveling, no gold needed to level, etc.

Re: Difficulty way, WAY, to high

PostPosted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:58 pm
by BlueSalamander
So as to avoid trying to manually balance dozens of complex encounters, a quick solution for allowing people to adjust encounter difficulty automatically would be to insert an automated Encounter Level (EL) balancing agent between your encounter loading module and your encounter spawning module. The EL balancer would use the CR/EL/ECL/APL guidelines from the 3.5 DMG to modify the encounter automatically until the EL was at a player specified relative difficulty (ie, Game Difficulty Very Easy -2EL, Easy-1EL, Normal +0EL, Hard +1EL, Very Hard+2EL, etc to +/-5), by randomly adjusting the CR of the constituent creatures before the encounter is spawned. So,some creatures might get removed, or have their HD reduced, or have access to lower level spells to make encounters easier, and some creatures may be randomly added, have HD increased, or spell level access increased to make encounters harder.
Thank you Shamino. While I'm not planning to do all the things that you suggested, as it's actually very complicated to implement, I do have a plan involving the application of negative levels to enemy casters and so on; I've been looking into this with the help of Tiavals (thank you Tiavals!). Negative levels mean that enemy casters will be more limited in the spells that they can cast, which is a major factor in the difficulty of many encounters.

Apply an automatic"short rest" after each encounter, where characters recover a percentage of HP and ability/spell uses. The percentage could be set independently for HP, spell slots, and ability uses, so you could opt for 15% HP recovery, 40% spell slots and 50% ability uses, for example. It could range from 0% (by the book 3.5e) to 100% (full recovery after each encounter, more along the lines of Pillars of Eternity 2). In this way, people could adjust difficulty to their liking, depending on the module difficulty, and how often they want to reload the game due to character deaths. This should be fairly easy to implement, since you already have items and feats implemented that do this sort of automatic healing after combat, and some items restore spell slots too. Feats like Die Hard would still apply on top of the short rest recoveries.
Very cool idea, thank you! Might get implemented.

Instead of charging GP to level up, allow characters to be resurrected without an item by paying GP
They can, by using the 'trade' dialogue option with cleric or sorcerer NPCs, then clicking on the red cross icon near a character's name to buy healing or resurrect someone.

Make it a little less damaging and more difficult to have characters "die". Allow game option to specify death HP threshold. Default is -10 as per 3.5e, but other options could be -10 per character level, or -1*max HP. It's tough enough they get knocked out easily, but even in the real world, only about 1 in 6 casualties is actually a death, and the default of -10 does not allow for that, as even at low levels, one critical hit can take you way below that. This would avoid having to reload just because a character got to -10 HP.
Cool idea, might get implemented.

I would LOVE to see the game keep track of how many times each character gets knocked out and killed as well, in the character statistics panel, in a list preferably including the cause of KO or death in each instance
Cool idea, the cause of death, e.g. electrocuted by a Lightning Bolt from the Goblin King. It gives off a strong ADOM vibe. Not a priority, though.

These are some of the most interesting and original encounters I've ever seen in a CRPG or even in pen n paper RPG, so I really congratulate you on that! The CR of the creatures in the encounters is just too high though, so it should be easily fixable without diminishing the awesome flavor and the inherently challenging nature of the encounters themselves.
Thank you so much Shamino! I think I will quote this in some marketing / praise material for KotC 2! :)

(everyone has) concealment or immune to critical hits so as well sneak attacks making one of my characters almost worthless unless some how I cast true seeing on him every single fight or even still that doesn’t work because we are using the base 3.5 crit/sneak attack rules. I know I keep saying this but maybe we should look at the Pathfinder rules for monsters and critical hits/sneak attacks. Along with the Pathfinder unchained rogue sneak attack. (Rules are free to look up)
Well, it may be a good idea to have a feat line that would allow Rogues to do sneak attack damage against creatures who have concealment or critical-hit immunity. Maybe even four feats: 50% of your sneak damage dice against concealed targets, 100% of your dice, 50% of your dice against targets immune to critical hits, 100% of your dice against them. I'm taking a note in my document for future feats.

Touch/Short/Medium/Long Ranges should be clearly visible graphically.
Thank you bluehinter, I like the idea. Might get implemented.

Automatic autosaves at key plot junctions or points where the party is likely to get massacred if they make the wrong decision. This is something that should be part of the editor as well.
Actually it's part of the editor through the script editor, where you can set script actions to make an automatic save.

all my characters had multiple stat drains and no means of erasing them
For that also, you need to use the Trade option with a cleric or sorcerer NPC (see above).

when you hit the Escape key, that screen should pause all background music/ambient sound and bring up four options for Save/Restore/Main Menu/Quit.
Yup, that is planned.

little friendly fire damage icon on friendly targets while determining the travel path of your ranged weapon/spell.
Cool idea, might get implemented.

Good points, I wanted to add that if there is an extended dialog prior to a tough fight starting, I'd also like an autosave right at the start of the fight
That makes a lot of sense. But it may be harder to implement than it seems, as some of the stuff happening during the scripted sequence may not get saved and restored when you load the game.

I don't believe that Pierre beat this game legitimately during testing. There's just no way.
I did beat the game with all the original settings and so did Tiavals. The castle gate battle, you need high initiative, use Ready Vs Spell carefully, and have lots of Prismatic Void / Summon Marilith / Accelerated Spell and Power / other powerful spells. You get a surprise round, it helps. But the thing is, I don't mind replaying the same battle many times, so for me all of the battles are quite okay even with all the original settings, gold cost for levelling up, etc. I think you get more of a feeling of accomplishment when you beat a very difficult encounter.

(Combined Fighting feat) the game should give that information : "this feat would only be useful if you have 2 weapons feats, which require 13 dex."
True. I will add that to the help entry, thank you.

This game's difficulty is just perfect, Age Of Decadence style. For those who find it too high, there are several options making it much easier: faster leveling, no gold needed to level, etc.
Thank you Yankee! Glad to hear that some people do like the difficulty. But yeah of course I get it, it needs to be tweaked more.

Thank you everyone who contributed to this thread! :)