I got annoyed at it because, well, because I kept losing, and I'm normally great at turn based games. Also matchmaking was a bit messed up in a way that made it hard to train up new units, but I'm sure they will/already have fixed that.
The art style is great and I'm going to play the shit out of the single player. And I'll go back to the multiplayer sometime when matchamking is polished and I'm feeling less easily frustrated.
A friend of mine said, "I'm glad I didn't back the Kickstarter, the combat system is horrible."
The combat mechanics are poorly thought out, and the gameplay is slow.
Basically you have two stats, armor (flat damage reduction) and health (hit points and damage combined). Attacks can damage either.
The end result is that you "always" use willpower to do damage to their hit points directly, because willpower bonuses to damage bypass all DR and minimum damage to health is always (1).
The other stats don't largely matter...
Yeah, as someone who played always attacking strength... it doesn't work. What happens if you play like that and run up against a high armor team is you hit for strength at 3-5 for your early hits, and their early hits bash your armor down for 4-6. The end result is that their frontline units end up weakened but not killed and you find yourself trying to break their armor anyway when you run out of will, while the archers and warriors (both great at punishing low armor units) that they've been keeping in the back start one-shotting your weakened guys.
Personally I think the combat has a bunch of great features. Varl (horned giants) take up four squares instead of one, which makes them great blockers but also makes them vulnerable to being blocked or swarmed (although most Varl units have a way to discourage swarming them in melee). Units larger than one tile almost never come up in TBS games, which is strange because its a great mechanic. Willpower is implemented in a very interesting way, as you can add a certain amount of it (your exert stat) to each move or attack. What's significant about that isn't just that you can pile up damage early in fights, but that base move speed is the same for all units of the seach type. So fast movement isn't an innate property but a resource you have to decide when to use; low exert units can find themselves out of range and wasting precious turns, while high exert units can leap across the battlefield at roughly double their current move speed... and hope all the wp they just spent doesn't make them useless.
The turn system also adds depth. Units take their turns one at a time, in a turn order that (with one notable exception) cannot be changed. What this means is that once combat starts you're heavily encouraged to make sure that every unit attacks (or otherwise makes itself useful) every single turn, which lends the game a sense of aggression that is very appropriate for its viking inspiration. There's also a whole strategy as to whether to maim enemy units and force the enemy to take useless turns, or kill them, and how to protect yourself against maiming, but I've gone on long enough and I'm also probably not the best source for strategy tips on this particular game.
My main complaint with it is the same one I have about Wesnoth: playing multiplayer requires you to commit to a game that might take 15 minutes or an hour, and its generally not polite to leave early (as opposed to FPSs where someone else will join and replace you). Thankfully the games are pretty short compared to Wesnoth.
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Topic: The Banner Saga: Factions (Read 1680 times)