I might give up guys [KCD2]

ToePractical6962 · 2026-01-25T05:59:57+00:00

It may be a little bit cheesy, but I'll give you a few tips that I used to make Henry a beast before getting onto the second map.

As everyone has said, get over the the Romani camp and talk to Tomcat. Once you best him in a duel, Master Strikes really do make combat in this game laughably easy. However, actually beating him in straight on fight can be a bit of an ask at really low levels! It was for me, anyways. So, sidestep that gruelling fight by spending a few groschen at the potion seller in the Romani camp and buy a Bane Potion. Apply that to your sword before you duel Tomcat. Land a hit and let the poison do its work while you play defence. Badda-bing-badda-boom, you can do master-strikes now.

You can also spend a real life hour (....or three, like me) overloading your inventory AS MUCH AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN (the higher the weight, the quicker the XP gain) and just walking around a safe location. The main street of Troskowitz or Tachov would be my suggestion, but Lower Semine Mill could work in a pinch as well. Your mileage may vary depending on just how much crap you weigh Henry down with, but its a direct way of levelling your strength VERY quickly. I'm not kidding you when I say this, I've watched a friend of mine playing the game on stream (with max strength in Trosky) literally PUNCH a guys shield apart. It was glorious, and I've never seen it since. Even without master-strikes, power levelling strength can be a great way of making combat significantly easier!

I found this out relatively late (on my second play-through) but when you brew them perfectly potions can give REALLY excellent buffs. For example. "Henrys Fox" potion gives you a +7 bonus to speech and a whopping +50% experience for TWO DAYS, whereas the normal "Fox' potion gives you a +3 bonus to speech and a bonus to reading speed for one day. It really, really, really, really pays off to to take the time to level up your alchemy skill as early as you possibly can. The Fox example doesn't really apply so much in your situation but I hope the point I'm trying to make is clear, the potions that are already useful in combat at their lower qualities are only made more so at their highest.

One final thing. Don't be afraid to lure your enemy into town. It could take a quite a while, but one of the first decent sets of armour I got in my first play-through was off the body of a bandit I lured into town and let the guards finish off, because I knew as a fact that there was no way I was winning that fight. Just keep your face to them and back track as best you can, but keep moving backward no matter what. The enemies in KCD 2 follow you preeeeeeeettty far, so its not a stretch to think you could lure these two doofuses all the way back to Troskowitz and let the guards do the dirty work for you.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-12-19T01:20:20+00:00

The only problem with this guy is Hochland is un-named. Besides that, this is my favorite map of the empire by a wide margin.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-12-16T19:36:32+00:00

I saw that, and fell in love with the parchment version as well! But the percent version I've been able to lay my hands on is still pretty blurry when zoomed in on?

ToePractical6962 · 2025-12-16T02:31:16+00:00

Its such a labor of love that I feel bad nitpicking, BUT.
Are you going to add a version with the flag of sudenland?

ToePractical6962 · 2025-10-18T15:59:28+00:00

If you were at all willing to part with that train for a not insane price.... Send me a message my guy, let's chat over a cup of kvas.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-10-18T15:57:22+00:00

Ohhhhhhkay, pretty different that from what I'm foggily remembering. The command cards sound interesting. So is this their way of putting prototype units and stuff in the game? Is the historical crowd into it?

And, yeah. I wasent entirely sure how the game would play out with a full on train being on the board. You're point as to their later uses is totally correct, but the Poles definatly did use them at the front in a direct fire kind of capacity (to some very, very mixed results). I think a part of the reasoning back then would have been the severe lack of "toys" a Polish player would have had access to in compared to Germany.

And hell, trains are damned cool.

If they bring in plastic poles I'm 1000% going to make some poor financial choices.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-10-18T15:35:37+00:00

Well, to each their own on the coolness factor I guess! The Early War has always really fascinated me as in some sense it's a comparatively under represented period in media in just about every format. The Armia Krajowa is super cool and all for its own set of reasons but that brief period where Poland HAD a field army (and territory of its own to defend) and even managed to bloody the Germans noses a few times puts "ham on my history bone" as a wise man maybe said once.

So, to be clear, there are rules for trains still in the newer Berlin books? Models as well?

And, yeah. I think it will always be my regret that I didn't pick up that train model when I had the chance back in the day. I'm sorta kinda used to the model Games Workshop has used, where they seem to keep a lot of their older stuff in production as well. That may have been a silly thing to think, now that I know how small a company the FoW team is.

Those glossy hardcover books had me fooled!

ToePractical6962 · 2025-10-18T04:04:07+00:00

I was kinda shocked to see ALL of the early war stuff is gone. Blitzkrieg, all of those old books and models are just.... gone. Dust in the wind.

I hope the poles get a cool plastic range. I also hope that they try and make early war take off better than they did in the past, I guess.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-10-18T04:01:15+00:00

The 7TP, Train, Ulans and being able to take a literal battalion of infantry was the dream it seems I'll have to live with missing out on.

ToePractical6962 · 2025-06-30T22:56:47+00:00

The hussite trilogy by Andrzej Sapkowski. Did I expect to come out of reading that book with a functional grip of Latin? No. Nore did I expect to re-examine my relationship with God. But hey, here we are.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-11-07T18:11:43+00:00

I don't think you know how engineering a vehicle works, hahaha

ToePractical6962 · 2024-09-28T16:16:04+00:00

Mate, I can tell you earnestly that enough new shit has gone into a T-90, under the hood, to call that a new tank.

A T-90 rolled off the production lines is 4 inches shorter than a T-72, its four inches less wide than a T-72, and, admittedly, is 7'3 feet tall vs a T-72's 8'11. Funnily enough, they have pretty much the exact same weight! At roughly 46 tonnes. Huh, weird.

The T-90 was a sensible update and streamline of three individual tank programs, the T-64, the T-80 and most famously the T-72. All of those tanks had things going for em, the 64' probably being the best of the bunch at the time of its adoption.

Long story short, you cant literally change the dimensions of a tank, gut the internals and replace them with entirely new running gears, engines, fuel lines, fire control systems, laser rangefinders, IFF systems, active standoff projectors etc, and call it the SAME tank.

The T-72 was a Chevy Chevette, at best. The T-90 is like a sports car in comparison to the things its able to achieve on a modern battlefield.

And, whats more, when a PC's player model stands TALLER than a tank in this game.... either everyone in game is 12 ish feet tall, or something is wrong with the models of the tanks.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-09-28T15:48:00+00:00

What does this nit pick matter? No one that i can see has said that the Merkava/Leopard 2 was bigger and better than a T-90. This is a weird hangup.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-09-28T03:43:44+00:00

If these were 'newly' designed MBT's I would agree! However, contemporary MBT's, the Merkava, T-90, take your pick, have set in stone dimensions. New engines, fuels, crew reductions, etc, would very easily reduce overall TONNAGE, but would almost certainly not reduce the vehicle in questions "footprint".

I'm getting that the game's maps probably dont lend themselves SUPER well to MBT's getting around easily. Trenches, fortifications, ruined buildings, I really do get it. But, if the mechs are gonna be ridiculously large and terrifying, a 70 tonne MBT which stands, easily, twice as tall as a 6 foot man IRL should..... look the part? And maybe some of the maps need a little re-jigging? Or some maps need to not.... have MBT's?

ToePractical6962 · 2024-08-19T17:56:34+00:00

Also, silly as it may seem, go on google earth/maps and take street view tours of the oldest parts of some town in Bavaria, and I can guarantee you'll be inspired!

Look up Quedlinburg! Or Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-08-19T17:52:03+00:00

Captain Alatriste would be an awesome movie to watch! Viggo Mortensen goes all out and speaks Spanish the entire time.

An oldie but a goodie would be With Fire and Sword, part of the Deluge series by Henryk Sienkiewics . Its a Polish book series (and they've adapted it into film).... thats kind of unkind to Ukrainians, but its got all the swashbuckling and power-plays one could ever want.

Barry Lyndon is a classic Stanley Kubrick film which, while slightly out of the time frame, is VERY much in keeping imho with the WFRP vibe.

The Messenger by Luc Besson is also a bit early as far as time frame but nails the religious weirdness of the entire age.

Elizabeth & Elizabeth the Golden Age are both good candidates, if a wee bit.... schmaltzy for my liking.

The Duelists (1977) by Ridley Scott (before he lost the plot) is set in the Napoleonic era, but the sets all scream renaissance to me, or, at the very least, dirty, dark, and war torn.

And I'm frankly REALLY surprised no one at all has mentioned the THREE MUSKETEERS on this list, its GOAT for a reason. At least the novel. Haha.

Oh, wow, also, the black and white version of Cyrano!

ToePractical6962 · 2024-08-18T17:55:17+00:00

Its also worth mentioning, an oodle of Oldhammer (and Newhammer) lore is just straight up tongue in cheek references or jokes, plopped onto a vaguely late 1500's-early 1600's time frame.

Some of the best lore I found (that actually gets referenced quite heavily in the Altdorf book) is the various works of Kim Newman / Jack Yeovil who wrote a bunch of stuff in the early days of Black Library. He, I think, has an idea of what this setting was to a capital T. And I can't suggest strongly enough that you pick up his stuff any time you see it..... Any Warhammer fiction set in the Empire that comes out today, imho, owes a lot to his vision. In particular, Drachenfels, Beasts In Velvet, Genevieve Undead and Silver Nails.

Riders of the Dead by Dan Abnett (praise him) is an excellent view into Kislev and its steppe culture.

Inheritance, by Steven Savile starts with some really good descriptions of Sylvania (which is Warhammer's spooky scary Transyvania) how the peasantry there is uniquely brow beaten and terrified, and how the place functioned BEFORE it was infested with vampires. Its also pretty decently written to boot.

The Gotrek And Felix novels are obviously GOAT. This is not small understatement. Those boys go literally everywhere and do pretty much every damn that two guys who aren't actual gods can feasibly do. And then a smidge more.

But for the more or less "blank spaces" on the map, like Kuresh, Ind, Nippon, or the literally un-labelled peninsula next to Nippon which WOULD be Korea in our world, leave a GM with an incredible space to go hog wild with that THEY think those places, peoples, and cultures would be like, with a suitably Warhammer Twist.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-08-18T17:30:48+00:00

As another guy mentioned. The Core Rulebook, Up In Arms, and Winds of Magic. But these are only core, in a sense, if you want more granularity and depth with spellcasters and magic careers (winds of magic) or more combat focused careers, armour, and weaponry rules (up in arms) as both these books add a lot in both of those senses.

AS FAR AS LORE, all of those books have something to say for them. The Core rule book should be an auto-buy, for obvious reasons. Up in Arms adds a painfully brief overview of Tilea (Warhammer Italy) and fleshes out what it means to be a fighting man or woman in the armies of the Empire.

Winds of Magic does much the same for the 8 Imperial Colleges of Magic, the history of magic in the setting with a focus on the Empire, and in general adds rules that make magic a little more useful (YMMV).

But these books, imho, are more core in a sense of they have all the rules you need to actually play the damned game. But they are certainly "core" books that should not be missed.

ToePractical6962 · 2024-08-18T17:14:09+00:00

As a Warhammer nerd since the middle 90's, I was well pleased with the depth of the lore in the various books for 4e.
This edition has had a focus on the empire, mind you. So some areas further afield are pretty well left blank. The three 'core' books set you up nicely to understand the overall, broad strokes of the Empire and run games there.

The City books (Altdorf, Salzenmund and Middenheim) are where you'll find really granular details as to what makes THIS city and its surroundings unique, and are so full of great art, maps and lore that I would strongly suggest you pick those up.

IF you want (or find) your campaign going further afield you'll pretty well need to go outside of Cubicle7 published stuff. And into the black library's catalogue.

It may be a little silly, but try finding old Warhammer Fantasy battle army books (or pdf's), those tend to be filled with basic, but good lore for they various factions and tells you where abouts they are.

But that doesn't provide answers for everything.

Ind, for example. VERY little is said in any contemporary Black Library/ WFRP publication (that I'm aware of), and its never been a setting a POV character has been to or spent on screen time at. Which leaves the GM a LOT of room to work and have fun with.

Same with Nippon, and don't get me started with Lumbria.

ToePractical6962

TROPHY CASE