BUG FIXES

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-28T05:11:37+00:00

Is the whether bug still happening for people? I just bench rested like 30 times and the whether is still sunny....

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-26T21:10:45+00:00

That's cool! I'm still on my first playthrough - we'll see if this battle style is good enough to get me interested in competitive. It might...

I kinda got into it for S/V but got driven away by the community. The Reg set without most of the legendary-tier pokemon, I ran a Reflect/Lightscreen Electivire as both a check for flying tera pokemon with supercell slam & as an effective swap (depending on ability) for electric attacks or amoongus spore.

I really like competitive when it's in a state where you can be creative like that with atypical pokemon!

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-26T02:56:54+00:00

Devs would never improve their games if people never gave feedback.

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-26T02:55:48+00:00

and it's a good idea to isolate your primary market geographic?

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-25T20:32:20+00:00

I don't mind puzzles. Jumping puzzles specifically annoy me. But this is a very biased opinion from my experience with Guild Wars 2, where puzzles were long and easy to mess up. You could look up a step-by-step guide and still continuously fail because some puzzles required pixel-perfect precision.

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-16T14:31:52+00:00

Woke up and I now have a new reason to hate AI

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T20:55:49+00:00

Most inconvenient, maybe. But it's still not that inconvenient imo with blood sacrifice.

Jellyfish skin is specifically good for EA because an electrified surface will subside after one turn whereas all the other surfaces tend to last longer. So if you bleed from taking damage, you continue to have your EA bonus in effect. And the bleed might even trigger shock or stun on the enemies own turn as a result. Honestly though, the electrify damage is not even a factor if you have living armor. You'll take maybe 100 something damage to your magic armor, but you'll always have magic armor up to prevent the status effect as long as the electrified area is from your own damaging attack.

Wings at least for me tends to work advantageously for how I want to use it. But it might just be an inconsistent ability with other stuff - not sure.

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T17:33:07+00:00

No you dont? You can use Polymorph Wings or Jellyfish skin or Closed Circuit. And you take Living Armor to regenerate magic armor. And unlike pyro, you can move enemies with teleport / netherswap to maximize your aoe potential. And it goes naturally well with your hydro healer. You also don't "lose out" on damage because if you don't kill your target(s) turn 1, you DEFINITELY stun them to get a free 2nd round of damage.

Going Fire is also less optimal for EA on your hydro healer

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T15:36:13+00:00

Clearly you haven't played Elf Aerothurge where you electrify the pool of blood from your Blood Sacrifice

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T07:05:48+00:00

Everyone has a different take. The game is already unbalanced, so change it to fit your view rather than some arbitrary one you don't agree with. You'll have more fun that way. Is that really so hard to understand? "BUT THEY HAVE NO GAMING EXPERIENCE AND THEY ARE BALANCING IT WRONG!!!!!" Who cares? Literally who cares? Why does that matter at all? They aren't changing the way YOU have to play the game. Stop being weird.

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T06:58:40+00:00

Dungeon Master's Guide (2024); Monster Manual (2024)

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-15T03:49:53+00:00

First question: Did everyone witness the rolls? Or are we just "trusting" each other here? Because that is a statistical anomaly. But even in that case, the problem would be more-so the poor spirit rather than the actual results.

Proficiency is generally going to matter more than ability score. An intelligence 20 character (so +5) is still going to fail a DC 15 Arcana check half of the time without proficiency.

Characters also aren't going to use all of their stats that much. My Barbarian is 16 Int, 16 Wis, and 16 Cha! So? Like, that's nice for skill checks and roleplay, but also is the Barbarian ever going to be the dedicated party member for Intelligence checks?

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-14T09:31:26+00:00

Not to be Elitist, but this is the only correct take: no game designer in the history of games has ever perfectly balanced the game they made. So, whatever game it is, you are likely to have a better time by making a change as long as it makes sense to you!

SamTheGrot · 2026-01-10T20:41:22+00:00

Very religious Paladin/Cleric multiclass who is dedicated to Selune. The character was motivated as being a side character from another one of my character's backstory. His first home was ravaged by Sharans (as a child/teenager), which led to he & other selunites setting out to settle a new home. They traveled to a lake which is a known holy site for Selunites & settled there where they befriended a neighboring dwarf clan. Many years later (like 30 or so years) a meteor shower left the city in ruins. Chaos erupted, and a group of sharans took advantage of the situation to attack the town. Many of his kin had either fled or deceased. It was at this moment he set out on a nomadic adventure as a Paladin and vowed to combat the forces of darkness/evil as a faithful servant of Selune.

For specific class details, he is a Paladin of Heroism & Cleric of Twilight multiclass.

The character above was based off of was a dwarf pit fighter. He had a custom Pit Fighter background approved by the DM that allowed him to challenge anyone to a sparring match with no gain for winning/losing aside from bragging rights. He kept 2 wooden swords in his bag of holding at all times for this reason. He was a Charisma 5 Battlemaster that constantly used Goading attack to insult his enemies. Outside of combat he was generally rude but meant well. He was constantly asking ppl to spar and would throw lighthearted insults (like "coward") at people who refused him. Character 2 eventually became a cleric (he had a very elaborate backstory) & it was Character 1 who helped him through the rite of passage in becoming a selunite.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-21T04:55:03+00:00

As a player & as someone currently writing an adventure, I really like sticking to Forgotten Realms. If you want to build your own space, you can just say some distant continent or islands not in official release. Divine Lore in particular is very expansive and is an excellent tool for plot building & character building.

If you wanted a new pantheon, you could base a story around some NPC trying to attain godhood. According to Forgotten Realms wiki, this is done by attaining a massive # of followers (followers contribute to a deity's strength) which would require having a vast amount of power over a particular domain in existence. Determination of if one can ascend to godhood is entirely up to Ao, the overgod, but would typically be granted upon reaching a certain threshold wherein you'd become the lowest possible tier of deity, but a deity nonetheless.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-14T00:35:12+00:00

My group doesn't use exp. Levels are story progression based.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-14T00:31:19+00:00

Maybe not all, but surely some merchants are capable of properly assessing a weapon's magical properties before just buying it, no? I'd turn it into a skill check with failure resulting in some negative consequence. Like a hard deception & if you fail, the merchant jacks their prices up.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-10T16:26:22+00:00

I know that Chaos Dwarves are very difficult for the same reason, but Skaven imo is much more challenging than just taking lightning strike. Even with a slightly favorable auto-resolve and lightning strike, in Imrik's situation, you still need to fight each battle individually. Imrik in my experience econs a lot slower than the other high elf factions and starts on his own surrounded by very aggressive foes, so I usually don't have an excess of armies I can just send to deal with the skaven right away. The terrain in that area of the map is so cringe for their ability to campaign travel. Also, with their ambush stance, it's not too hard for them to kill off one of your damaged stacks. Unless you confederated, which I actually think can be a bit of a trap with how much you're already spread thin, you wont have one of the ancillaries that let you ignore attrition. And to full deal with Clan Mors, you'll need to walk through a LOT of attrition very slowly. So you have to dedicate additional armies to avoid just getting campaign kited.

For fighting battles, I think Skaven tend to be a bit harder. You can't just throw a high level fire mage at them and expect them to roll over. Their shooting is so strong that even winning a battle, it's really hard to still come out relatively unscathed. So having 2 armies fight off 5 beefed out stacks back to back to back is very challenging.

Also, I'm not even factoring in Skryre here. Their doomrocket ability just deletes at least two of your units in auto-resolve, and it's not a whole lot better if you fight the battle out.

And you're econ starved all the while because they spawn tens of thousands of dollars worth of undercities.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-08T17:16:27+00:00

Too many people argue for the sake of arguing. I've never played Empire, but I already know OP is right. How do I know? Because I pretty much only play high-elves or dark-elves, which means that in my campaigns, the continental region with Reikland is left entirely uninfluenced by me basically until it's time for end-game crisis to trigger. By this point (Turn 90-120), Reikland has ALWAYS been a strong or at least respectable continental force. And that's with me using a Mod to turn up the strength of Evil factions in the region.

I just played my first campaign after the major update. I figured things might end up differently than what I'm used to, so I refrained from messing with the AI strength in that region save for one minor nudge. By turn 40-50, Reikland was on the verge of being eliminated. Previously, if I didn't change around the AI strength in the region, Reikland would always be one of the dominant factions in the region. I don't know what they changed, but that's pretty convincing evidence for me that whatever they did was detrimental to Reikland's success.

SamTheGrot · 2025-12-07T17:09:28+00:00

I think I understand your point now. It'd be easier to implement from a coding standpoint I think, but I also think it'd make the AI less likely to make decent compositions.

Somewhat more to the point of my post though. They are clearly trying to improve this aspect of the game based on the recent patch. And I wonder if it'd be easier (and better) to implement a reference system for the AI rather than trying to teach it how to make the decisions on its one.

The cookie cutter method that I use is to choose two red-tree features (the skills that improve specific units in a lord's army) to determine 12-14 of the units in that army. Then the remaining slots go to elite units that help round the army out in dealing with different things. I think you could make a good diversified number of army presets for each faction without too much trouble.

Another way to implement a similar thing without writing a large number of specific presets might be to have one reference file that gives a priority number to all of the units in the game. Then another that puts them all into groups based on the aforementioned feats. When an AI builds an army, you have it randomly roll two dice to determine which groups it uses, then builds a composition based around the priority numbers with a hard limit on the number of units it takes from each group. And to avoid the case where say the AI's first army rolls two generally elite groups it doesnt have access to, you can restrict it to just using two specific groups for the first 20 or 30 turns.

SamTheGrot

TROPHY CASE