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[Mephansteras]

Well, that sucks.

I mean, it's important to cater to that niche and to offer that experience. In my opinion, XCOM only shone when things well and truly mattered, namely when you were playing Classic Ironman. Otherwise it's fun, but I wouldn't feel attached to the characters. But there needs to be a gentler introduction to the game...

This has me worried.

Yeah. XCOM is a great example. It was a financial success and tons of people played it. But most of those people, from the stats I've heard, only played Easy or Normal and many never finished. And that's fine. The game would have flopped if the Impossible Ironman crowd were the only ones being catered to. But the fact that it had multiple difficulty settings, an Ironman mode, and numerous Second Wave options to alter the difficulty curve further all served to heighten the appeal of the game to a wider audience.

Mordheim *really* needs to do this if they want it to do well financially. It's not like the grognards can't brag about how they only play with all the difficulty options maxed out.

[nenjin]

I've got mixed opinions.

I personally didn't find the difficulty too much. I almost enjoyed it despite how obviously inflated it was.

But I *HATE* draconian solutions to what are effectively people cheating. I know you need some insurance for MP games to prevent it, but like you, I like save scumming because I'm a filthy casual. I actually ended up doing it rarely in my last game of Mordheim, but I appreciated the possibility. Effectively wrecking your entire warband for alt F4ing or crashing is way too much.

So while I don't necessarily agree that "grognards ruined it", I do think they're reacting a little too strongly to people's insistence that there be checks and balances. Because frankly I don't give a shit about MP.

Part of this I think is that Mordheim is trying to please two masters: MP and SP fans. I should go give the game more time since I haven't played in two updates. I've just got too many games to play (including, ironically, Vermintide.)

[Majestic7]

Mephansteras has good points.

Nenijn, I don't think the grognards ruined Mordheim, I think they just have a chance to ruin it if there is even more "RNG fucks you up and nothing you can do"-moments. I enjoy !!FUN!! like the next guy, but I don't think arbitrary kickings in the balls are fun. After I got into the game properly, I pretty much ceased doing alt+F4 or anything of the sort. However, had I ever got into the game without it? I don't know.

Mainly I think the people with 400 hours of game time have a viewpoint very different from the people buying the game at launch and they are unable to see that themselves. Still, if that is how it goes, I consider it an interesting social experiment in Early Access model and the way it can affect game development.

[Neonivek]

I dunno. When is a game Dark Souls and thus the crippling often unfair difficulty is considered fair game.

And when does a game need to coddle its players who don't want to learn via trial and error.

The problem that I am seeing is that the game is meant to be Dark Souls, so to speak, it is meant to be a harsh game where you are using every trick you can muster to survive. An easier mode in the game is just a hold over until the player graduates into genuinely difficult gameplay. The losses and injuries just being what you deal with along the way.

While Xcom was a game that felt more balanced for normal mode, but they included higher difficulty settings. You didn't really graduate to classic, you just like the game enough that you wanted to play a tougher version. With the game operating with the idea that the player will save-scum their way out of trouble.

So Mordheim is in this awkward position of wanting to be an approachable Dark Souls... With players who would break into tears if there was a single consequence to their actions... While others want the game to plop you into the middle of the room with no clue what your doing as monsters eat off your knee caps.

[Majestic7]

I think Dark Souls is a different beast, since when you lose, you only lose time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically dying pushes you back to a point where you reached in the past. Then you must grind your way back to the point where you died and try not to die again. You lose some stuff but it isn't permanent - you can regain the stuff either by making it back to your point-of-death or simply by getting the stuff again.

This is different from Mordheim as the losses you suffer are permanent. If your minion dies, the minion is dead for good. If your favorite thug gets a crippling injury, the thug is crippled for good. There is no way to recover from the blows dealt by the game.

You *can* recruit experienced members to the band if you can afford it, thus replacing the losses of experienced fellows. However, this is only true if you can afford it. If you get into a spiral of losses, the chances are you are not making money to recruit new guys. And if you spend money to recruit new guys, you don't have money to train the old guys. This creates a potential for a spiral of doom, much like the tantrum temper spiral of old DF. The difference is that in DF I always found the wanton destruction fun in its insanity, where as in Mordheim I can imagine it to only be frustrating. (Mind you, I've never experienced this kind of loss spiral in Mordheim, but I can see how it could now be possible or even likely for the first couple of warbands a newbie plays.)

So where as in Dark Souls you only lose temporary investment of time, in Mordheim you might potentially lose the whole campaign - like if in Dark Souls you had to restart the whole game after a couple of deaths. This makes the consequences "more real" in a way, which is enticing as a challenge. However, it is likewise frustrating on those who would prefer other kind of gameplay.

I enjoy both kinds depending on the mood, so it makes this issue sort of close to me.

The shitty thing is that the whole stuff is pushed upon all players because of multiplayer, which is typically only played by the minority of players but that minority tends to be very loud. (I have no idea how the player base is divided in Mordheim; I'm mainly comparing to other strategy/tactics games.) 

[nenjin]

Yeah, I don't think this game is shooting for Dark Souls-like difficulty. They're focused on two different things. DS is all about knowledge and timing and execution. CotD is all about positioning and luck.

Difficulty tweaks flow from their ability to code the AI, I think. XCOM had the benefit of more or less straight forward level and combat designs. Melee was fairly infrequent, levels involved a lot of open space for shooting and the terrain wasn't very complicated. (Basically all flat planes and blocking obstructions to facilitate a solid cover system.) The Aliens didn't have a very tall order to fullfill: try to kill the player. Mordheim AI? Kill the player. Loot wyrdstone. Guard the wagon. Mordheim's AI also hunts. XCOMs AI was rather passive in just usually waiting for the player to find it (other than like, Terror Missions.)

I feel like Mordheim's AI has more to deal with. It's a TBS game that operates on some level almost like a FPS. Level geometry is fairly complicated, LOS rules are basically FPS-lite, you can potentially fail doing just about any action short of walking and there's lots of potentially complicated situations for the AI to figure out. (Like mass melee combat, zones of exclusion, wyrdstone vs. combat, outnumbered vs. overwhelming, trying to appear like it's not obviously hiveminding its team despite that being exactly what players do, etc....)

So I believe the game's difficulty is what it is because they can't code a better AI to provide the best challenge in that environment. Back in the earlier updates, the AI was very, very easy to abuse. Basically if a fight wasn't happening in the middle of the street in full view of its team, you could sit back and watch it walk its fighters into death traps one at a time.

Table top Mordheim is a game designed for PVP. The rules, the terrain, movement and options, all designed with a human brain in mind. An AI simulated to play like a player at a Mordheim table top is what they were going for and I think it turned out to be tougher than they thought. Or maybe not. I remember lots of games in Mordheim against players that were total blowouts due to just one or two factors. Bad deployment, poor choices in where to move after deployment, a couple unlucky rolls.....

This game captures that a lot of the time, but as players we often see it as a failure of the AI that produces matches like these. Too easy? Bad AI! Too hard? Too many AI buffs! Against players? It's "Eh you got fucked by Nuffle" "Eh you shouldn't have spread yourself out so thin" "Eh I sat back and shot you with ranged and you didn't take the hint." We excuse what happens with other players because they're players. The AI, we don't cut so much slack. And so they gave the AI flat buffs to compensate for the fact it can't make novel or sometimes even obvious tactical decisions. The best it can do is swarm you, focus fire your weakened fighters and pray the combination of stat buffs and luck will be enough to provide a believable challenge.

For me, it does, sometimes. The AI is swarmy enough now that you do have to think about how you're going to hold it off while not losing fighters. Sending people out in 1s and 2s is a huge risk you can either choose to avoid or capitalize on. In that sense CotD is even harder than table top because you can't see the AIs deployment, so not blobbing and waiting for the AI is a real gamble. There's enough tension in that dichotomy I've been entertained. But it's reaching the point last time I played where ever game was a Turn 3 Team Battle, and I'm hoping it can be more flexible than that. Right now even on scavenge and wydrstone rush missions, the meta is "how much wyrdstone can I safely get before the entire AI team is up my ass."

I really should restart my warband and play up again from scratch, to see where the AI is at now.

I think the game is in a really good place for MP actually, it's got everything it needs for it to really satisfying. So again, while I don't like what they've done to crashing/alt-f4ing people, they kind of have to do it. It would be a glaring flaw in an otherwise superb MP design if they didn't.

Like I said before. They're trying to please two masters and generally I feel like the balance has tilted toward MP, because all the "fixes" on the SP side feel somewhat like bandaids. I'd have liked to see what a Mordheim game solely focused on SP would be like, but I don't fault them for chasing MP. It is honestly what the original game was about. I think what we have in SP is enough for me, though. Enough for me to recommend it to WHF fans without many reservations.

[Stuebi]

Allright, with 40 hours into it, and multiple maxed Warbands, let me take another rant at this.

First and foremost, as loathsome I feel to admit this, the difficulty is actually not as bad as you might think at first glance. I've reached a point with every Warband except sisters, where I'm going for Brutal / Deadly missions only, because the reward is so much greater and normal / hard missions actually do feel like they're cakewalks. I think there's a sweet spot, where your guys reach a stat / skill level, where they are very good at the specific thing you built them for. The AI on the other hand seems to be spread out fairly evenly.

My Skaven Warband was built completely around Warp Posion (For those who have no idea what that is, it's a poison applied before you actually engage, which lowers the enemies max OP, basically denying them attacks). I had one meele rat with high resistance and Warp Poison, and one designated range guy also with Warp Poison. The other two were built for critting and casting respectively.

That Warband had a 97% Success ratio, and a 1270% K/D.

My Possessed Warband was built around Glass Canons with high Dodge ratings. I dont have the exact numbers for them, but it was also around 90% success ratio with a similiar K/D to the above.

Now, I'm not saying this because I think that I'm that amazing at the game. I wanna highlight that there are a LOT of builds that basically turn the game really easy, and just highlight the AI issues even more. The AI is close to being completely predictable, to the point where you can build your Warband KNOWING that camping, holding out in buildings and abusing Choke points will almost guarantee you a win, barring a bad roll streak ofc.

There are however three features in the game, which basically add random "You will now arbitarily get owned" moments.

The first one's demons. If I'm not completely remembering it wrong, you start seeing those at Warband rank Level 6 and only on brutal or deadly missions. They spawn randomly around the map and you NEED to focus them down with at least 3 -4 guys, to even have a LITTLE chance of killing them. They come with a massive hp pool of over 600, have 3-5 attacks (They can and will frequently kill even heroes with a focus on toughness in one turn) and they also induce Terror tests, making them even harder to kill. IF they spawn, they basically stick to their starting point until they can see the first guy that comes into their sight. Basically, if the Demon spots the enemy warband first, you get a free win. I've had a good chunk of missions where I could run around looting freely while one Demon pounded a 6 man enemy warband, completely on his own. On the other hand, if he gets to you first, you have to pray they dont one-shot one of your guys and then bolt. The only real disadvantage demons have, is that they cant climb. So you can completely nullify the problem by finding climable high ground, promoting even further abuse of the AI.

Second one's ambushes. There's a 10% chance (It was 15% before the current patch) that you get an Ambush on route to your mission. They can be either in your favor or in the enemies favor. Basically, the ambushed Warband has less starting OP and SP, less chance to hit and lower melee resistance. The Warband doing the actual ambushing starts out with all of their guys in either Overwatch or ambush stance. There is NO way for you to influence this in any way. You cant send scouts, you cant choose to abort, you cant even voluntairly rout when it happens. It's just a plain "You get arbitary disadvantages NOW."-moment.

And finally, there's the market rotation. It's supposed to give you a new stock of items every 8 days. But the stock can get raided on route, so you get NOTHING new. If you get unlucky with initial equipment, or some of your stuff get's stolen, you REQUIRE that market rotation to get back into the thick of things. It's just another random "haha nothing for you!" moment.


So what does all of this add up to? It promotes restarting Warbands over actually trying to stick to the one you have early on. Heck, even permanent injuries are basically meaningless. Absolutely everyone I know will just drop the guy that lost an arm, or a leg or whatever, and replace him. If they cant because of money, they restart. This is later nullified by you having such ridicolous stacks of cash and gear, that even the death of a Level 6 Leader means absolutely nothing. Just get a hired sword, and if you cant, stick to one or two normal / hard missions to level a new one. Basically, you keep restarting until you get a decent couple of missions early, and then the game turns into "Ai Abuse Simulator 2015".

The AI's rating is based on your rating. So let's say you had 5 guys, and one of them dies. If you keep running missions with 4 people, the AI will stick to 4 as well. So there isnt a different feel, there is no impact. There isnt even a real punishment beyond Gold. And even that just means either restarting if your Warband is young, or just drawing from the 8k you have in your bank later on.

The Dev is WAY too obsessed with the whole "WE WANT TO BE HARDCORE" thing, and that echo chamber, maliciously calling itself "Steam discussion" is happily telling him how cool he is for doing it. The game is BUILT for you to get owned out of nowhere, without realizing that it doesnt actually matter even one bit. It's obsessed with throwing deaths and permanent injuries at you, even tough they dont matter at all. Removing "save scumming" didnt fix anything in this regard. It just added time frustration to the mix of stupid design decisions.

And of course, all in the name of Multiplayer. Someone please, for the love of all that is RNG, send that guy a letter kindly explaining that a LOT of people couldnt NOT care less about your stupid, unbalanced, boring Multiplayer. There isnt even a programmed Multiplayer Campaign in yet, and they are ALLREADY shoving it in your face. All it needs is a checkbox "Singleplayer only", with alt+f4 or save scumming, and everyone is happy. But no, let's subscribe to the "git gud scrub"-crowd.

To put all of this in a short summary. This game is trying it's very HARDEST, to be hardcore, to throw arbitary deaths, injuries and other stuff at you. And none of it matters even a little bit. It's been a while since I've seen so many bad design choices in such a short amount of time. There are still places in every Level where the AI will ignore collision, or get stuck on corners. But no, people where not accepting our random difficulty hardcoreium! Let's fix that RIGHT away. Wanna know where the difference from this to Dark Souls is? If you die in Dark Souls, it's YOUR fault. If you get owned in Mordheim, there's a good chance that it was just the game randomly deciding that you were having too much fun.

This Dev needs to get his priorities straight. There is a good game in here. But it's getting closer and closer to being buried beneath lazy difficulty and focus on the wrong things.

[Neonivek]

Yeah the key to a bleeding edge difficult game like I think Mordheim should be aiming towards... is how well you can recover from defeat.

Even in, say, Darkest Dungeon I can eventually get back into the thick of things and still have my upgrades from before. You REALLY can screw up your start though... and lose all your good heroes... and then have to spend hours getting good ones so you can do tougher dungeons...

But it is at least on the right track conceptually.

The Cheaper Mordheim wants to be, the easier it should be to pick yourself up again. Faster then Light can utterly screw you over if you get fantastically unlucky, it is rare but lets pretend it almost always does, but making a new game and playing an entire round doesn't take long at all. Likewise in Arkham Horror, for the most part, you are expected to be screwed over once in a while but recover from it...

If what you are telling me is correct. The game burns you from both ends. It screws you over in game and it screws you over after it... making AI exploiting almost a necessity to even fairly play it.

[nenjin]

I agree the sweet spot for this game in difficulty is...elusive due to a lot of reasons. The lack of things feeling like they matter is also an issue. In an effort to get people to retain injured fighters they just introduced a lot of bonuses to injuries. So losing an arm gets you 20% dodge or w/e. Which just sits wrong with me for a lot of reasons.

And sort of like injury bonuses, all the passive shit they stack on to ambushes just strikes me sloppily trying to compensate for balance problems rather than actually addressing them. It's like when the forums said 'ambushes are bullshit' what the devs heard was 'ambushes are too easy' and just piled more (not immediately apparent) modifiers on it.

I think the game lacks that something X-COM has where you get attached to your current playthrough. Like Stubei said, the urge to just restart is really strong and there's not a lot counteracting it. There's a fail state for missing wyrdstone shipments but honestly those are pretty hard to fuck up, even if you have to retreat to normal/hard because of a bad run.

I think this goes back to something I observed about the game going way back to early access: their solution to things is to throw more numbers at it, rather than rethink some concepts. On daemons, I can appreciate why they made them that hard. A single ANYTHING isn't a match for a full warband and some AI and pathing bugs. But it doesn't sit well. And really, it's true for all the combat in the game. One or two or even three fighters isn't a match for a player's hive minded warband, and so they have to dial everything up to ludicrous levels to inject some challenge into the game.

If you like winning with pretty small odds of failure, CotD provides enough crunchy leveling up and immersion to make that enjoyable. The game just never achieves that satisfying balance of challenge and success. The scales tip from predictably manageable to woah holy fucking shit hold on now all too easily. At this point it is the game it is, I think it's headed for an end of the year full release. Mechanically, I don't know if it's ever going to reach the level of impressing people but it is still some decent X-COM like Warhammer Fantasy. It's just a shame it didn't come out as well or as faithfully as Blood Bowl.

[Majestic7]

I think all these problems are, in the end, caused by the obsession with multiplayer. Basically, the dev seems to think people playing single-player are just grinding their warbands so they can kick ass in multiplayer. So single-player have to be made hard so it can't be used to gain power for MP matches. This, I think, is a clear fallacy as time and time again it is shown most players don't usually play MP at all in most games. (No idea about Mordheim player base, maybe Steam has some stats.)

I suggested adding a "casual single player mode" where you don't get achievement and can't use the warband in MP, but get to save and load freely etc. Yeah, when I got flamed as a cheating noob and derided by the dev for that suggestion, I gave up on the forums; I don't think there is changing the course anymore.

[Hanzoku]

I see reading comprehension isn't high on their list of skills, then. How can you cheat if the save is specifically barred from playing multiplayer?

[Majestic7]

Well the logic was that the only real way to play the game is with maximum difficulty, huzzah! Thus, any other method of playing the game is cheating and watering down the True Experience.

I dunno, like Stuebi, I can win constantly because I know how to exploit the AI, unless the RNG really screws me up. So it isn't about the game being too hard for me to play. It just isn't very much fun if exploitation is the key to victory. Nor is it welcoming to newbies who aren't willing to spend first 20 hours of playtime restarting crippled warbands.

This is a shame because I really like the game and I can see a lot of potential there. It is just being wasted. What I'd want to see would be for the game to thrive and get loads of more warbands as DLC etc, then eventually Necromunda... but I don't see it happening right now.

[nenjin]

I'm not sure if that was ever in the cards. It's been a quirky game from day 1, from the mechanics to the controls to a lot of things. Sometimes, the AI gives me decent fights, or at least interesting ones based on the terrain. Sometimes it's a curb stomp going both ways. I don't think where it's at now or will probably be at by release is great, but it's tolerable.

[Stuebi]

To specify, I'm not saying the game's complete garbage. It's really not. There's a lot of fun in leveling your Warband, and skilling your guys for specific things. Getting a Black Rat close to a 50% crit chance, or building an Assassin Adept for poison can be a blast. But it's all kinda pulled down by the litle issues the game has.

[Anvilfolk]

I'm a newbie, and Mordheim is scratching a itch that very few other games do. I haven't gotten adept enough for the things people are complaining about to really matter to me... not yet, at least.

Those controls and interface though. All of the information is incredibly hidden, hard to access, the controls are super consoley (why aren't all the active skills in a single skill bar? And the passives elsewhere, just waiting for a mouseover?).

It also has another of the things I can barely stand in a game: the animations take way longer than gameplay itself. I hate this. Fights take two to three times longer than they could've because I am waiting for the interface to pop-up, or the fighter to crouch, the stance animations, and random stuff like that. Ugh. Hate it. It's seriously impacting my enjoyment of the game... I don't suppose there's a way to skip animations?

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Of course, as soon as I say that I am enjoying it, I get into totally bullshit RNG that I just can't even. Miss 3x79 hit chance for the last hit on an enemy, then hit on the 4th, only to have them on dodge a 9 hit chance. Finally hit that enemy, leaving him with 2 hp. In the meantime, everybody else died and now everyone has permanent injuries and basically no equipment.