So I decided to give this a whirl, and I've been noticing a few... peculiarities.
Now, it's probably my fault for picking Hard difficulty, but I'm used to "hard" meaning "challenging; intended for people with patience and a good understanding of game logic and mechanics", not so much "completely unfeasible".
I'd developed my settlement to the point of having a level 2 tavern, which unlocks contracts. Figuring I'd take it easy the first time around, I selected the lowest-difficulty contract I could find, which had me going out in search of one Fleb the Flatulent, with a reward pot of a measly 285 gold (I had somewhere around 1500 in-pocket at the time).
I was quite surprised, then, when Fleb effortlessly massacred my two hired cronies and proceeded to two-shot me through my shield blocks, all while running at the same speed I moved while dashing.
I tried various tactics of dodging, timing stuns, kiting with ranged weapons... Nope, all pointless. No effort either from me or the rest of my party could so much as make any visible progress on his health bar, and everyone was dead within seconds. And he was impossible to kite as well, thanks to his obscene speed and apparently not even needing to wind up for an attack animation.
So I doubled down on the mercenaries (who apparently do anywhere between 5x and 20x the damage that I can muster, because... Well, because protagonists suck, I suppose?) and brought with me some 7-8 of them (costing many times more than I'd stand to gain by bringing his head in for the bounty) to finally put an end to this rogue goblin.
This time they at least managed to take 1/16th of his health down before everyone lay dead and rotting and I got interdimensionally stabbed again.
So, yeah. Between that, the wolves, and the orc warlords for the Orcbane quest, it seems like this game really doesn't have much of a difficulty curve. More just a difficulty "fuck you".
Otherwise, it seems like really the way this is supposed to be played is to just try and make as much money as possible so that you can afford to hire more mooks to do the fighting for you, seeing as they're faster, healthier, and have FAR more damage output than you could ever hope to attain. Anything beyond the first few goblins will pretty much require that you just put some money down on a moving meat horde while you sit in the back and cower beneath a shield from the infinitely-piercing arrows that end up in your area.
I've also noticed that the campground building upgrades are... Well, shall we say "not created equal"? I upgraded my apothecary from level 2 to level 3, only to learn that I had in fact made it worse, as now I needed to go through a door transition in order to reach the same two workbenches that had been provided in previous versions. And upgrading from 3 to 4 requires what I can only hope is a placeholder value, as it went from needing 500 wood, 100 leather/cotton/food etc., to needing 9,999 adamantite bars.
Would I be correct in making the assumption that it's not even physically possible to accumulate that much wealth? Does the highest tier of storage tent allow you to amass 9,999 of anything?
Also, I'm slightly worried about what happens when the local resources run out. It seems that dwarves cannot replant fields or perform basic forestry once the supply of fallen apples and independently-grounded twigs is gone (it would also be nicer if the worker numbers were a bit more visible, as they have a habit of getting hidden on the map screen).
EDIT: Okay, so, I've just about cleared out all the nearby resources, and I've got more migrants than I know what to do with. This is unfortunate, because if they're hanging around basecamp then there are so many dwarves that I can't access the healer and blacksmith to freshen myself up after explorations, so I need to just send everyone off to some random holding cell until I find a new area with resources, at which point I shuffle a few back to camp and then over to the new resource spot so they can pick up whatever scraps exist there.
There should really be some kind of indicator on the map for when an area no longer has resources available. Or, heck, any kind of indication as to what KIND of resources will be available in a location, since there's really no telling.
A "forest" icon could provide you with leather or wood, as one might expect, but it could also be food, or cotton, or stone, or it could be a dry spot and there's nothing there at all! You won't know until you've gone there and then re-checked the map screen.
Seeing as I'm running out of implemented locations to scavenge and I'm also running out of materials to upgrade my buildings with, I'm reaching the point of "what happens when there's nothing left" a lot sooner than I would have expected. Frankly, I think the resource system could do with a serious overhaul.
Really though, the greatest sin I've seen so far has been the fight with Jorog the Bull. One thing is how massively tanky the brute is, requiring a very long and tedious battle to whittle him down, but it's absolutely unacceptable that his attacks are what they are.
I'm not talking about the damage (which I was able to soak bizarrely well, all things considered), I'm not even referring to the big shockwave he sends out with every smash. I'm talking about the fact that he can whip around to hit you mid-animation if you're behind him, and the shockwave will follow.
This means that he can wind up, hit the ground as you dodge past him (there's some weirdness with this too, where dodging during or just before an attack will see you dash out of reach and then get damaged when you're nowhere near him), and as you're getting some space on the other side of him he'll turn around just in time for the outermost blast (which was going the other direction) of his shockwave to hit you.
Thankfully the shockwave itself doesn't do any damage, but getting tagged by it and having the screen zoom in while time slows down makes an already tedious slog of a fight just that much more drudging.
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Topic: Regions of Ruin 65% off for 7 days and 10 languages (Read 7771 times)