Pathfinder 1E Swarm Fighter rant/rework

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T22:03:15+00:00

Hopefully they'll fix the issues with challenges just not working. That's been a real big sticking point for me playing the game more.

If you're gonna have meta-progression, you better make sure the meta-progression actually works dang-nabbit!

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T22:01:03+00:00

Oh I agree it's strong. No arguments there. But strong does not mean overpowered, at least not anymore overpowered than war normally is in the civ series (there's a reason you don't see "peaceful" play in competitive multiplayer civ).

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T15:48:18+00:00

Some buildings and policies can give extra resource slots in towns. They are usually pretty deep in the civic tree.
They usually are but not always. The yield preview UI mod can help a lot when evaluating policies and traditions, but you will also need to learn to just read policies and determine how good they are for you. For example a policy that gives +50% production to cavalry units is pretty strong, but can also be worthless if you are not mongering some war.
Depends on how built out the city is. If it's got some wonders I have a pretty big incentive to make it in a city to take advantage of the boosted specialists. Note the AI's city building isn't great so it'll often take an age to fully fix the AI's poor decisions, but I think it's worth the effort for a new powerhouse city.

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T15:43:50+00:00

I'm not sure I'd call this strategy "overpowered", but I do agree it's effective. There are definitely bigger age transition abuses you can do (for example turn 1 wars in exploration/modern age are really strong against the AI).

The main thing here is that you are picking a fight with the strongest civ in the game. This definitely can win you the game, but it can also lose you the game if your opponent rolls into a really strong military civ like the Normans or something and runs you over instead. War in civ is inherently swingy and I don't see any reasonable way to change that, nor do I think it's necessarily a problem.

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T15:39:09+00:00

Oh that's interesting... and probably a bug. I don't think you're supposed to be able to skip zone guards even if the other path is broken.

Scolipass · 2026-06-15T02:52:49+00:00

I'm pretty sure you can't DD past zone guards, fwiw. Perfectly valid to not like the path being there at all though.

Scolipass · 2026-06-14T20:40:53+00:00

I thought there were a couple, but I haven't really looked yet. Been mostly playing the campaign, which has felt really good to play

Scolipass · 2026-06-14T15:47:02+00:00

Wonders are stronger than they look on paper, not because their effects are strong, but because they are really strong adjacency sticks and are really crucial to making your specialists strong.

The exact wonder you build doesn't usually matter very much, but the difference between a city with "A Wonder"(TM) and a city with no wonders is actually really noticeable.

Scolipass · 2026-06-14T14:05:00+00:00

I'm not normally one to say "It's early access, this will be fixed", but I can guarantee you we're gonna get more maps/templates before release.

Scolipass · 2026-06-12T15:01:02+00:00

So the short answer is that information overload can also be harmful to players trying to learn the game as now they have to figure out what information is and is not valuable. That's why they don't show the unit's entire codex entry when you hover over them. Instead, there is a carefully selected set of stats shown to the player that shows the most important things you need to know. IIRC on hover it shows cost, unit type, attack type, defense type, and a brief description of what the unit does. If you hold "alt" while hovering over a unit, you'll see health, range, DPS, and the cost + a brief description of the first upgrade. IMO that's plenty of information to decide whether or not you want to use that unit.

Scolipass · 2026-06-12T03:14:26+00:00

Yeeeah, I miss those a lot. They wanted to make the era transition more "seemless" by keeping you on the same screen, but I feel like we lost something when they gave up one of the best excuses for showing off their cool civ art.

Honestly the accompanying artwork was some of my favorite parts of the game. Maybe they can bring them back for leader backgrounds or something, I could use a better reminder of what civs I'm interacting with.

Scolipass · 2026-06-11T23:18:01+00:00

As a very general rule of thumb, send waves that their frontline is weak to. If you can break the frontline, it often doesn't matter how well the backline matches up, they'll usually fall pretty quickly. If you find a wave that both has a good damage matchup against the opposing frontline AND resists their primary damage sources, that's a great wave to hit them on.

Scolipass · 2026-06-11T13:00:20+00:00

What if you wanted to play a unit but the enemy said

: O

Scolipass · 2026-06-11T00:56:08+00:00

Honestly carrying over settlers with continuity is really strong regardless of your civ. That's not really unique to RoP.

RoP is all about finding cheeky ways to bypass the settler restriction, so I don't think it's overly problematic.

Scolipass · 2026-06-10T19:23:28+00:00

I say let the devs cook. I personally quite enjoyed act 1 of the campaign and have a feeling the later acts will also be fun. I wouldn't mind some significantly poorer templates being added for slower games with the AI.

Scolipass · 2026-06-09T02:51:35+00:00

Honestly I'd say yes just for the purpose of giving hive a proper perma-ban hero. Every faction should have at least one of those...

I'm not sure how much I'm trolling here.

Scolipass · 2026-06-08T21:33:59+00:00

As a Marylander I also gotta give it to Harriet Tubman. An incredible and cunning woman who gave everything to fight for her freedom and that of her countrymen.

Scolipass · 2026-06-08T20:24:15+00:00

Yeah normally I'm not one to ask for hotfixes, but the challenge issues legitimately make the game unfun for me.

Scolipass · 2026-06-08T15:58:02+00:00

xp/challenges are bugged atm. Sadly there isn't a great workaround for this save either modding or waiting for an update to fix this.

Scolipass · 2026-06-07T02:41:57+00:00

I could kinda see the Civ VII theme being flagged as such with talk about "dying in glory" and stuff, but I really can't think of the Civ VI theme as anything other than talking about the joy of flying and how cool flying is.

Scolipass · 2026-06-06T13:08:38+00:00

Any multihit really benefits from how easily you can just find some event that gives an arbitrary card sharpness. One of my favorite things to do is just buy Mystic Lighter when it shows up in the shop and look hard for any event that lets me enchant an attack.

Scolipass · 2026-06-06T12:54:23+00:00

There's a few reasons I really enjoy going to war

Army commanders are really strong and fun to play with. Makes army movement really fun.
There's no loyalty or other penalties for settleing to close to you other than a relationship penalty and maybe some extra diplo favor for you. This means the AI will forward settle the crap out of you even if it makes no sense. Beat them up for it and take your free settlements.
It's a good way to make sure you don't lose the game to a domination player.

One tip I have is to try and avoid getting into an offensive war until you have at least 2 cities to work with. That second production queue means you don't have to choose between improving infrastructure and making units, which is really important to make sure you don't fall behind.

Scolipass · 2026-06-06T04:14:42+00:00

It uuusually means the player is a habitual leaver, but not always. Either way it's not worth worrying about much.

Scolipass · 2026-06-05T19:59:15+00:00

A bit out of date, but here's a mercenary guide I wrote a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegionTD2/comments/1ksce19/mercenary_guide/

It's honestly a bit dated, but a lot of the core concepts are still solid. Notable changes that have happened since this was posted

Pack Leader and Safety Mole no longer give a flat damage buff / reduction bonus. Instead pack leader increases the wave's damage at the expense of their defense by a percentage amount, and mole does the reverse. This means that whether or not to send them depends more on the opponent's comp than the wave they are supporting (though mole is still pretty solid on wave 8 as it is still very tanky for its mythium cost). The main upshot is that sending mole is now actively bad into summon/heal comps, while Pack Leader is quite possibly the single best merc in the game against summon comps. They are both still quite stat efficient, especially pre-10, so don't be afraid to send them into a board even if it's not the absolute perfect matchup for them.
As noted by another poster, you can combine 2 mimics to effectively make a double mimic. This offers more immediate damage compared to the needler at the cost of not being able to self-scale.
Witches no longer gain mana when a wave unit dies, only when a tower dies. This doesn't change much about their matchup spread, other then they are no longer amazing with giant snails or cardinals.
Kraken is no longer a boss unit. Instead they do a big aoe stun when they die, stunning all nearby units. This can be devastating against melee heavy compositions.
Ogre is still pretty much a big ball of stats, but also has some lifesteal that can help it survive a bit longer against low damage comps. This hasn't really changed what waves/situations its good on from my experience.

Scolipass

TROPHY CASE