Yes, I am making a new thread for every game I'm playing, because screw your megathread.
I won this game in the steam auction, and I've been having a blast with it. It's an old-school CRPG with all that entails. Party creation (except for one preset guy), turn-based combat, and brutally punishing difficulty. This game does not want to hold your hand at any point. It's awesome. Steam tells me I've put away 39 hours in it so far, and although that includes two restarts before I figured out what I was doing, I'm not even halfway through the game yet.
Strongly recommended for any CRPG fans. The screenshots on Steam don't do it justice. It's also only $13.99 as part of the Steam winter sale - believe me, this is amazing value for the money.
I'm very happy that CRPGs seem to be making a comeback lately, even through the more indie/experimental side of things. It was a long, dark decade when the genre was dead. Now I just need Wizardry 9...
Some tips, if anyone does get into it and don't want to do too much trial-and-error.
A few things I learned from the first restarts:
- You need a cleric. Divine Summoner and Paladins can heal, but they can't replace a cleric, even together. Paladin skills seem to be awfully expensive too, so I'm not sure how good they are. Divine Summoners need a different play style than normal.
- It looks like you can choose 2 attributes to increase per level, but that's not actually true. You only get one choice, because the other attribute is speed. Always increase speed.
- The game does not like generalists. Either generalist characters or generalist parties. It pays to specialize. Pick a status effect and stack it. On my third game when I started stacking stuns, it made the early game much easier than on my first playthroughs. If I were to playthrough again, I might try stacking wounds instead, the few I'm getting from my bow user are turning out to be helpful.
- Gaulen, the character you're stuck with, is a utility character rather than a combat character, and doesn't get nearly enough skill points. Unload whatever utility skills you can from him so he can focus on knowledge of herbs & terrain. I've got my mage doing perception and object identification and my thief for traps and locks. Gaulen still needs skill points more desperately than everyone else in my party.
- Knowledge of herbs increases the amount of herbs you get when you pick them up of the ground, as well as the random finds. The things are so useful that if you have the patience for it you can be better off in the long run if you hold off on picking herbs until you have more points on the skill.
- Knowledge of terrain is deceptively useful. There are certain areas where you will be running out of food even if this skill is high.
- My current party makeup: Barbarian, Soldier, Thief, Mage, Cleric.
Lords of Xulima
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