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[JimboM12]

we were kind of taking over the blurb thread with talk of Kingmaker Wrath of the Righteous so i thought id make a thread for talking about it and kingmaker and any other rpgs we want to discuss

having fun with wotr so far. its kingmaker but instead of storybook kingdom management its got a war game built in. also as a paladin, my divine bond horse has become a badass on its own.

the name rng named him monarch and even without the combat tricks and power that other animal companions have, he's kicking the heads off of demons and cultists. like for real, i set up his charge and set him on spellcasters or archers and he'll charge them moving x3 as fast as any of my party mates and kick the poor bastards head off in a shower of gore.

[Cthulhu]

How far in are you?

I'm at Drezen and the game kind of fucking sucks.  The story and characters are fun but it's just continually reaffirmed for me that Pathfinder is the worst version of D&D.  It eventually just becomes this endless slog of applying and reapplying fifty buffs and fighting monsters with enormous stats, resistances, and immunities, pigeonholing you into specific strats and making a lot of stuff completely pointless.  If your spell pen checks and save DCs aren't huge don't even bother casting offensive spells. Mythic stuff lets you break the rules in some ways so it may get better at that point, I'm almost there, but right now I'm really struggling to stay engaged with the combat.  It sucks cause I really like the characters and I'm reasonably interested in where the story is going, and I've already lowered the difficulty once and I don't really want to do it again but I'm thinking about it.  Or playing something else, I dunno.  Solasta looks cool, and stuff like pillars of eternity that use their own ruleset.

I used to be a hard recommend on this but I'm not sure anymore.

[JimboM12]

im also at drezen and im not much of a caster, but im not afraid to munchkin the hell out of the game at the "core" difficulty (with the death's door mechanic enabled cuz losing the game for a lucky crit to my main character sucks ass).

for instance, ive created a mercenary ally inquisitor with a dog animal companion. the inquisitor is designed to fire a crossbow and heal, the animal is ment to kill/brawl. added to my paladin bond, this gives me 2 more party members past the usual 6 allowing me to take some of the pressure off of my damage ranged dealers like woljif, who ive designed to be a stealth caster: his touch of acid combined with stealth attack causes him to pop lower leveled enemies and heavily damage higher ones as even demons don't seem to have acid resistances. not to mention my inquisitor can use artifact crossbows with effects to blast enemy spellcasters.

i task my animal compatriots on enemy spellcasters immediately (i have the real time combat set to pause on combat start) and the enemy is deficit enough to not focus on these fur missles as they wiz by to masticate their spellcasters.

the dog animal companion has the added benefit of tripping enemies so ive been saved on a few minibosses by the dog (i learned this trick in kingmaker and interestingly rng named him squire) tripping the enemy allowing everyone to get in multiple attacks of opportunity

pathfinder and dnd have always been tough tabletop games depending on your rolls and your dm, but on pc the dm is a unthinking, unfeeling computer and so im not afraid to do things that would get my ass kicked at the dm's table. if you want a more authentic experience, don't be afraid to lower the difficulty to something that supports how you want to play cuz not everyone would want to bend the rules as much as me.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

WOTR has a lot of good ideas, but its kind of core gameplay isn't very compelling. But tbh, it shares a lot of these flaws with other CRPGs.

The biggest thing so far is that it is in a frightening liminal space between handcrafted adventures and random/radiant/procedural storytelling--that is to say it doesn't transport the versatility of DnD very well to a computer game.

In it's defense, that's insanely hard to do--DnD's biggest strength is that while we DO have a fairly strict representation of characters, the world, and actions through a matrix of numbers, what actually happens it negotiated between all the players and DM. There's no hard limit on things. And while certain things maybe be unadvisable or make your immediate future more difficult or !!!FUN!!! it can lead to really interesting/quirky/compelling content. In that regard the only games I've really seen approach that experience have been Morrowind (to a much lesser degree) and D:OSII.

The other really irksome thing is how time consuming stuff is. Resting, travelling, exploring, looting, levelling up--there's hours of hang time just tryna get where you wanna go. It doesn't do plot v summary v well.

Game specific nitpicks:

1. Dev's seem to think all evil characters are petty moustache twirling sadists... which really kind of takes any of the nuance out of a lot of RP builds.

2. There's a bit of an issue of narrative scale. In a dungeon it's maybe okay to rest... once? but sometimes it's like I rest after every other encounter and it's just dull and long and immersion-breaking. Spells in particular seem... kinda weak.

[Cthulhu]

Resting is the plague of games like this because it completely breaks the balance, yeah.  Resources are designed to be spread out over the course of the day, if you let players rest too much then they can go full griswold every fight and then to compensate for that you have to make the fights harder, which means the players have to rest more, and pretty soon your level 8 party is bending over monsters designed to be campaign villains.

In regular D&D you fix this by having like 50-60% of the dungeon's encounters below the party level, but without all the other aspects of D&D to consider that could get boring in a video game.

I don't use any mercs because I like the characters, but yeah, that'd probably make the game easier.  Some characters are better than others and not being able to respec them completely really limits what you can do with some of them.  If I play the game again I might use a mod for total companion respec.  Second playthrough will be swarm-that-walks, but I should probably win the first playthrough before I get ahead of myself.

[Kanil]

Wrath sure feels like it has a lot more "you expect me to win this at level 3?" fights than Kingmaker did. Like I ran into a succubus that my strongest character -- when buffed -- could hit like 15% of the time, and everyone else only could on a 20... that was kind of an experience. I haven't even completed the first chapter yet and I'm already finding the game a bit exhausting to play.

[chaoticag]

The succubus can be tough this early on, but you generally want some method to hit touch ac or make enemies flatfooted somehow. Currently running a Kitsune vivisectionist build I had since the beta and at level 3 I have 4 iterative attacks with sneak attack damage at 2d6. No idea if this will bear out well the rest of the campaign but being able to push your dex to a minimum of 30 is helpful.

[vjek]

How far in are you?

I'm at Drezen and the game kind of fucking sucks.  The story and characters are fun but it's just continually reaffirmed for me that Pathfinder is the worst version of D&D.  It eventually just becomes this endless slog of applying and reapplying fifty buffs and fighting monsters with enormous stats, resistances, and immunities, pigeonholing you into specific strats and making a lot of stuff completely pointless.  If your spell pen checks and save DCs aren't huge don't even bother casting offensive spells. Mythic stuff lets you break the rules in some ways so it may get better at that point, I'm almost there, but right now I'm really struggling to stay engaged with the combat.  It sucks cause I really like the characters and I'm reasonably interested in where the story is going, and I've already lowered the difficulty once and I don't really want to do it again but I'm thinking about it.  Or playing something else, I dunno.  Solasta looks cool, and stuff like pillars of eternity that use their own ruleset.

I used to be a hard recommend on this but I'm not sure anymore.

I'm past Drezen, wiped out all the current demon armies, and am working through the story.
This is what I went with, character-wise:
1: Feyspeaker (Druid) + centipede
2. Sacred Huntsmaster (Inq) + raptor
3. Wildland Shaman + leopard
4. Sylvan Sorcerer + monitor_lizard
5. Wizard Scroll Savant (Nenio)
6. Arcane Rider (Magus) + smilodon

So that's my Gnome Druid, Nenio, and 4 Gnome Mercs + 5 animal companions.  It's quite the endeavor sometimes to get positioned, but so far, so good.
My intention was to go 3 divine + animal companion plus 3 arcane + animal companion, but the wizard is pretty handy, although I hate the opposing schools mechanic Nenio has.
With spell penetration and boosting stats appropriately, being a spellcaster isn't too bad, but there are more than a few fights where the Animal Companions win the day.  Greater magic fang, natural attack buffs, teamwork feats for each of them.  For the first time (for me), outfitting animal companions with equipment actually has merit.

In any case, the whole crusade/campaign/armies against the demons is an interesting thing.  I'm not really sure what their goal was, but some fights require literal thousandS of units to win some battles.  But you can (by default) only recruit <=22 per week of some units.  And you can't put more than 3 unit types into one army, without certain ranks in skills your generals may never get.  They try to address it with certain events that grant Maneuvers I to all generals, but seriously.. why not just start at 4?  Why do I have 9 types of units if I can use 3?  Why can't 3 armies under 3 generals actually travel and attack together? Nope! You all get to die alone, 3 unit types at a time.  Huzzah.   

I kind of understand the intent.. you're supposed to, I think, advance the levels of your crusade (logistics, military, diplomacy, whatever) and as you do, you can choose different unit types.
The problem is, unless you know ahead of time that energy resistance, damage resistance, spell resistance and AC of your enemies is SO high.. you can't/shouldn't really choose m/any defensive unit types.  And, afaik, you can't undo or redo those choices.
If you choose badly, sucks to be you, those units can't hit any enemies, full stop. No matter how many buffs are applied by your general to your units, nor how many debuffs are applied by your general to the enemy units.  So you end up with being forced into an army of glass cannons, and losses are truly staggering, but it's the only way to win some fights because the enemy units are simply invulnerable, otherwise.

We're talking about things like immunity to 3,4 or more damage types, plus full and continuous immobilization of ALL of your units, while the demons teleport freely around the theatre/battlefield and wipe out half your units in one hit.  Eventually you get things like Marksman with a +36 to hit, and that helps, but enemy units target them first, and of course with teleportation, you can't prevent them from crushing them after they shoot once.  I mean, when your best infantry has +6, and all enemies on the field start with DR10, you're gonna have a bad time.    Once you start getting to the fights with 4-6 giant teleporting/caster/summoning/immobilizing/charming demons... well, yeah, against your 3 unit types of AC7/1d4+6 you lose.  100%.
Objectively, some of the 'foot soldiers' of the enemy are more powerful than a level 20 ally general, and that seems a tad overpowered.

As a result, to Cthulu's point above, I've had to cheat the hell out of the game in order to play through at a reasonable pace or with any semblance of 'fun'.  Of course, sometimes, fun is in the eye of the beholder, but trying to fight some of these armies is just..not possible, mathematically.  In fact, even WITH cheating and adding thousandS of units, I still lost some of those battles, that's how tilted the playing field is, in favor of the demons.
Personally, I am simply trying to play through, once, without spending weeks of "skip day" and being subjected to endless sieges.  So, yeah, I too am just sacrificing everything to advance the story, which is really too bad, because some of the mechanics seem like they could be fun, situationally.

The party/ally AI is as bad as or worse than Divinity:Original Sin, Sword Coast Legends, or Pillars of Eternity.  You can't really (again, afaik) control what they're going to do other than Ranged, Melee (by weapons) or repeatedly cast one particular spell or use one particular ability.  That's it.  So you end up with casters that have dozens of available spells, but they use one, because babysitting them during combat just prolongs the fights and you're back to slogging.  Honestly, I don't blame the players for min-maxing/optimizing, because otherwise, you're faced with the very real possibility of being unable to progress via party combat because you've come across some creature(s) with immunity to everything, DR10+, and 36+AC.

I do find it kind of.. silly? amusing? ridiculous? that they had to add damage immunity bypasses for casters in the Mythic paths.  I mean.. c'mon.  If you have so much energy immunity that you have to bypass a core mechanic, maybe that core mechanic isn't really well balanced?

Anyway, I'm still progressing, but I'm not sure it's an actual winnable game via playing as intended.  Maybe I'm playing it wrong. 

[ndkid]

The succubus can be tough this early on, but you generally want some method to hit touch ac or make enemies flatfooted somehow.

This comment reminds me why I stopped playing Kingmaker and haven't been excited by WoTR. In most tabletop D&D games, the players build characters that interest them, usually with an eye toward broad synergy ("hey, we need a cleric and don't have one yet"), and then the DMs job is to craft challenging encounters for that set of characters. If the DM threw out an encounter that trounced the party, and then said "well, it's not my fault none of you took touch AC spells" I think most players would roll their eyes and find a different DM.

I think there's a way to build an encounter building AI that can look for strengths and weaknesses in a given party and modify encounters based on that (in a way that's more nuanced than "moar HP"), but that's not what this series of games is trying to do.

[chaoticag]

... I guess? In my experience though it is kinda hard to get an encounter builder that churns out results that make sense and doesn't get too swingy. I'm also not saying those are the only two ways forward and rather just something I personally suggest for handling encounters in this kinda game. But yes, games like this will more often than not boil down to some amount of system mastery that includes character creation mastery. It may not be impossible to get some system the way you want it, but it's a fair bit bigger of a design overhead for a computer to do that versus a human to do that, and 9/10 times the human would do a better job of it.

[Cthulhu]

System mastery is an important part of games like this, and honestly it's pretty much the reason Pathfinder exists.  For an RP-centric game that doesn't assume a degree of optimization you probably don't want Pathfinder at all.  Or just play on low difficulty.

What I'd like to see is a Swords & Wizardry or OD&D adaptation for a CRPG.  Make it a hexcrawl, constrained open world with a bunch of stuff, focused on exploration and getting treasure, big roster of characters to bust out depending on what you want, and high death rate along with that.

[JimboM12]

yeah the metagame's gonna have some issues compared to kingmakers kingdom rpg aspect. ill reserve judgement but the base units, archers and footmen, seem to be designed solely to skirmish or fight other base cultist units. i get this feeling it gets better as you unlock more recruiting centers and i get the feeling some of the side battles you see available aren't ment to be fought immedately but saved for when you've built up your crusade. the game seems to imply you're supposed to rush to drezen immediately with your initial armies and clean up later but most gamers aren't going to do so, so you'll run at that goddamn giant fly army rated x3 higher than your initial force losing a quarter of your entire force, its annoying. i get what they were trying to do: you need to level your generals and upgrade your forces but in the early game its very very limited.

as for the pnp setting, im still at core with death's door, but im munchkining as hard as i can without outright cheating. custom built demon destroying merc companion, more party members than the og 6, min-maxing strengths, spamming items and scrolls, etc. if i wanted a smoother story telling experience id drop the difficulty but i want that baldur's gate 2 hard, slam my fist on the keyboard, reload for the umpteenth time experience.

i just realized the key to my personal success: protection from evil. i was wondering why ya'll kept bringing up the succubus from earlier, she was a very tough fight but protection from evil, communal, made everyone practically immune to her spells like charm and pumped their AC against her so i was only getting hit so often when combined with protective luck from ember (she's the mvp of my companions, for real). pretty much every opponent you'll fight in the game is vulnerable to this as they're all evil typed.

also im probably going to pay to respec some of my companions soon, zen archer on lann just seems useless after level 3 with his stats. i would do this early but i don't want to weaken him with a dip too early, so i'll do it after i can properly build him with enough levels.

[Cthulhu]

I didn't like Lann.  Wenduag is pretty badass though, I went warpriest on her going off some ideas online, going throwing axe instead of longbow.  Throwing weapons are really strong, and warpriest can replace weapon damage dice with an escalating value so it gets better over time. 

The limitation on rebuilding characters to their join-up level really sucks, though there are mods for it.  Nenio's illusion specialization is alright, but she took abjuration as her opposition school which sucks

Protection from evil is good, other good abilities are align weapon, crusader sword, dispel magic. Cost tough enemies will have stacked buffs and you can neuter them hard with a dispel magic from a caster that can actually get it to land.  Raise dead is an easy way to get flanking or absorb a few hits, but they're barely speedbumps against tough enemies, slayer-type minibosses can probably wipe the whole squad in one full attack. 

My party is...

Main guy.  Tiefling instinctual barbarian, going mythic trickster.  Early on you get blur and mirror image which are cool, later spells are even sillier, and trickster also gets skill feats that add bizarre new powers to the skills, e.g. trickster athletics can roll to break any crowd control, even mental ones.  Trickster perception can spot things that don't exist, adding new powers to magic items you find.

Camellia.  My other frontliner, fragile but she can rack up really high AC and hits reasonably hard.  Has some nice buff spells.  She's also a fun character, I like her. 

Wenduag.  Like I said, warpriest ranged DPS, hits hard with throwing axes and can sneak attack.  Also has spells, mostly self-buffing stuff.

Nenio.  I'm annoyed that she doesn't have abjuration but she's still good.  Selective grease is only level 2 which she gets like 9 of with mythic spell slots and can trivialize some fights.  Selective web good too, selective create pit is nice to just remove enemies from the fight or get rid of dominated teammates until the fight is over, illusion buffs are nice.  Selective stinking cloud is a giant fuck-you button for non-demon/undead fights.

Daeran.  Mostly a bless and channel positive energy turret.  With phylactery his channel healing is huge, but his oracle weakness really fucking sucks and seems to bug him out sometimes.  He often fails to use touch-range heals, just walking up and not casting.  Still nice, and he's a fun guy.

Ember.  Ember is good just for slumber.  She has some other nice stuff but slumber is completely busted.  Ignores spell resistance, can only be used once on a given enemy and most will save against it but with no spell resistance anything that isn't sleep-immune has a 5% chance of getting dumpstered with coup de grace and multiple AOOs.

[JimboM12]

storywise, my favorite companion is Regill. he's cold and pragmatic, but is courteous to other lawfuls and his solutions for problems are smart and practical. i don't needlessly antagonize him as i realize i need someone who's not afraid to get their hands dirty, and even with his cold pragmaticism he is 100% against the demons and is the kind of guy i want drilling my frontliners and organizing battles. he's almost my version of thrawn.

example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

on the path to drezen, his solution to the bug hordes is smart, practical and minimizes losses. having adamantine armored heavy troops act as bait and chucking acid bombs into the swarms of bugs as they calmly retreat and reorganize? very smart

[Hanzoku]

Still in early game, but my party is starting to solidify.

MC is a STR-focused melee bard with a glaive. Standing behind someone crunchier (Seelah) and beating people down never gets old. Provides bard songs and back up healing on demand. Will be going Azata for super powers and dragon companion.

Seelah - a sword and board paladin in a game chock full of demons. Rarely ever gets hit, and does a solid amount of damage. Gave her Radiance, because story-wise it just makes sense that she uses her idol's weapon and redeems it.

Lann - Point and delete for the enemy back line. Any caster eats a face full of arrows and goes down.

Wolijf - sneaky-stabby thief. Theres enough traps you need one in the party. Honestly, Cameilla is better at being a rogue then the rogue is. but at least Wolijf isn't a turbo-bastard to Ember.

Ember - Designated heal bot. Doesn't output any damage on her own right now, but sending enemies to sleep is hilarious every time the centerpiece of the enemy group goes down for nap time.

Nenio - I don't like her all that much, but a party needs a wizard for their buffs, and Wolijf isn't capable of taking up the slack.

Playing on normal difficulty with the exception of allowing 'permanent' debuffs to disappear on rest, and I'm allowing companions to level according to the leveling scheme. God the default decisions are bad. Stupid things like Seelah wasting skill points on mobility despite being in heavy plate (beyond the 3 needed for fight defensively to improve). Any subsequent runs I'll be doing it myself so I don't have to deal with the stupidity and missed chances. (No chance Seelah goes and gets Cornugan Smash on her own, I'm sure)

I'm looking forward to my lich death knight run once they un-fuck the lich mythic path though. Cameilla, Wenduag, Daeran and the rest will make a solid early party. I'll probably miss having Ember and Seelah around though.