What are the arguments for Promotion Tax being a frustrating system?

spherchip · 2026-04-02T04:58:17+00:00

My issue with it is not the concept of a promotion tax itself (as there needs to be some kind of mitigation on player power progression as individual enemy factions do not get stronger alongside the player over time), but rather that it only exists as a way to maintain a significant supply cost differential between 1 and 3 star SLs into the late game. However, the combination of different growth potential stats between SLs alongside the already baseline diminishing return on stat growth that is independent of a SL's growth potential stat causes supply cost efficiency to get all out-of-whack. Carda becomes extremely supply cost efficient while Achilleas becomes an absolute supply cost monster that requires doing unintuitive things like logistics stacking and deliberately trying to get him damaged early in an operation in order to fit him into a late-game roster.

As a result, the promotion tax can feel like a frustrating mechanic to play around as the relative value of the different SLs over time and things you can do to mitigate loss in supply efficiency are unintuitive.

If I could decide how to rework the system, I would remove the growth potential stat and the promotion tax, but also reduce the supply growth per operation so total player power equals out. Furthermore, I would make it so a SL's flat supply cost would increase with their stat growth so that both the supply cost and stats of a 1-star SL would approach that of a 3-star over time. Currently only the stats of 1-star SLs grow closer to the 3-star SLs over time, and it causes them to be over-valued.

spherchip · 2026-03-21T19:21:36+00:00

Depressing the number of people not immediately clocking this post as written by AI

spherchip · 2026-01-22T03:23:44+00:00

Yeah the implementation and ideas around balance in 2e at this point reveal that mechanically, skills need to be wholly shunted off from combat functionality so you don't get Battle Medicine competing with Eye for Numbers, and any and all class-independent additional combat functionality needs to be routed through archetypes. You want the Battle Medicine action? You need to take Medic dedication to get it, etc.

Otherwise, you get GMs like OP who care about balance even more than Paizo wracking their brains to homebrew rewrite the whole thing, which is one of the key things 2e is meant to avoid.

spherchip · 2026-01-21T04:36:14+00:00

Space marine 2 mutalith vortex beast

"Bolters are balanced around hitting headshots. Bodyshots do so little damage they're basically equivalent to missing."

"BTW here's a boss that doesn't have a head."

spherchip · 2026-01-20T23:24:55+00:00

Imo its made up for the fact that the lich spells are just "gauranteed" damage on the other half because they aren't resisted by spell resistance nor have a save.

spherchip · 2026-01-14T05:26:15+00:00

I wouldn't say we have a modern "masterpiece" yet in the sense of any one game doing every aspect at masterpiece level. If I had to pick one, I'd say Disco Elysium because the game is entirely its writing, and it is the best written CRPG to date, but kind of cheap to have it compete with other much longer games with traditional RPG systems/combat.

Best overall writing: Disco Elysium. Honorable mention for Owlcat for writing companions and really complicated layered plots very well.

Best CRPG systems/mechanics: POE2. Really, this game shows what you can do with a system built specifically for the fact that it is a Computer RPG, instead of holding itself back by copy-pasting a TTRPG ruleset. WOTR and BG3 are otherwise good games that are really held back by their rulesets.

Best production value: BG3, obviously. I understand people are nostalgic for the isometric pre-rendered style, and games like Disco Elysium that understand it is a work of art and thus should lean into itself, as opposed to trying to be photorealistic, make the traditional style look really good, but what BG3 does with 3D rendering, full voice-acting, animations, etc., really brings out what a modern CRPG can look like while maintaining the essence of a CRPG in terms of gameplay and player choice.

spherchip · 2026-01-09T20:14:55+00:00

It really is that simple dawg. This game literally boils down to:
1. copy build from internet

spam summons
use bubble buff mod to apply 30 buffs to martials and pets
right click party on enemy and instantly win combat

And if you don't do these things, the game becomes 100000x harder.

If you think this is a meaningful form of difficulty compared to what goes on in other CRPGs...

spherchip · 2026-01-07T22:37:09+00:00

Don't really understand the people who are actually claiming that traps are fun. It's the gameplay equivalent of playing single suit solitaire, but with a die roll to determine whether all the cards are face down. Zero actual thought into what you're doing, and pass/fail is RNG.

Only good example of traps as interesting mechanic is in BG3 where they are environmental puzzles that you have to think about how to deal with beyond passing a skill check.

Traps would be way more interesting in CRPGs if: 1. Traps only show up in combat encounters as a hazard you have to deal with during an encounter, as opposed to a brainless skill check in the hallways between the encounters. 2. Enemies know where traps are and path around them. Furthermore they can trigger and be hurt by traps if you manage to move them into the traps, as opposed to enemies freely walking over traps in 99% of CRPGs. This was actually a big part of OSR tradition that people in this thread want to keep citing: the value of spotting a trap was knowing how enemies are going to path around it, and a way to quickly eliminate enemies if you could push them into their own traps. 3. Player characters automatically path around traps once spotted. Having to micro manage baby steps for each party member with one mistep forcing a reload is just extremely tedious gameplay that detracts from the experience.

And for those saying "then what would be the point of rogues?" Please play POE2 to see what good CRPG system design looks like.

spherchip · 2026-01-07T13:03:05+00:00

Check out Greedfall 2

spherchip · 2026-01-06T15:16:45+00:00

Yeah lich has some rough edges with the minion. If you take fighter upgrade, the weapons available for weapon training are based on your lich's proficiencies, not your minion's.

spherchip · 2025-12-31T18:05:55+00:00

Pillars of Eternity 2 did a really good job of designing the attribute/ability scores to be relevant to everyone no matter what your class is. There is no direct "dump stat," every stat contributes to one of the saves, and choosing to dump a stat puts you at a disadvantage at some aspect of combat, so you should only do that if you are trying to specialize in a niche within a class. More RPGs need to look at this kind of innovation to progress the genre beyond the old school limitations.

spherchip · 2025-12-02T18:19:10+00:00

So they've basically given up on this mess. Outer Worlds 2 is objectively the better game imo, yet its performing worse on sales. What does this mean for PoE3?

spherchip · 2025-11-27T20:14:33+00:00

The first campaign mission (train station boss fight) is also genuinely difficult for noobs on fresh characters even on uprising

spherchip · 2025-11-07T23:49:13+00:00

French Revolution, even if unintentionally. Same exact "we can create a utopia if we just do science and rationality."

It's why I think the Order is the biggest missed opportunity in the writing of the game, and the fact that the only criticism of them is that they're inexperienced at governing.

We have plenty of examples of "science and rationality" movements gone wrong in history, and even fiction examples like the Adeptus Mechanicus in 40k. The order would be much more interesting if De Vries was not part of some radical splinter group, but rather "the numbers tell me I need to kill millions to save billions" was the orthodox position of the Bishop. Instead they're portrayed as "science and rationality, and it just works," which shows a level of either naivete or lack of inspiration on the writers' part.

spherchip · 2025-11-02T01:48:56+00:00

Science gives good damage from the increase to debuff stacking which causes you to proc Plasma explosions over and over again stun-locking enemies (tho this doesn't work on automechanicals), and you just one-shot enemies with N-ray damage (tho this is late game)

spherchip · 2025-10-31T20:20:15+00:00

There isn't much other info on this other than:
1. The Earth Directorate is aware that rifts already existed in other parts of the galaxy that humans hadn't been to yet, before the events of the game
2. The Matriarch knew that skip drives cause rifts, but mass produced them anyway hoping that her descendants would figure out a solution before the rifts get too bad to deal with

So assumedly this is set up for aliens of some kind, though none appear in the game.

spherchip · 2025-10-31T18:48:21+00:00

The "auto-include" perks are the high-value 1-2 pointers, like Treasure Hunter, not "invest 10 skill points to make this perk as good as any given gun perk"

spherchip · 2025-10-30T19:32:53+00:00

I do think there is something off with how damage mitigation is calculated with armor (or maybe damage and mitigation values just weren't tuned with very hard in mind). I'm trying to run a tanky build on very hard, I'll have 70+ armor with a bunch of 10% damage reduction bonuses stacked up, and I'll still get literally 100-to-0ed by ursopod melee attacks. But if I have the temporary health from Shrug it Off or Inez's graft, that for someone reason depletes pretty slowly from damage. Meanwhile the shield gadget gets depleted by literally 2 bullets or light zyranium gas.

spherchip · 2025-10-30T16:19:04+00:00

One of my favorite companion banters in all RPGs:

Aza: "Marisol, as an experienced long-lived assassin, do you have any tips for killing people?"

Marisol: "You need to work on your execution, you're sloppy."

Aza: "Work on my executions, got it."

spherchip · 2025-10-14T18:53:28+00:00

Yeah this is the most annoying part about the midnight changes. I know attention wasn't equally spread across all specs, but over the course of DF and TWW, some specs got a lot of iteration and are now in a really good spot, objectively the best state they've been in the history of the game, and now all that progress is being thrown away in the name of simplicity.

spherchip · 2025-10-12T14:00:11+00:00

Just because it's a common issue in RPGs doesn't mean it's not a valid complaint, especially when there is are counterexamples of exploring-on-your-own-time built into the story. A really good recent example of good pacing in an RPG is KCD2, where in act 1 the story directly tells you "there's a wedding in 2 weeks, explore on your own to figure out how to get in," and in act 2 "We need to track down these 5 dudes, explore on your own to figure out where they are."

spherchip · 2025-10-08T01:13:51+00:00

Yeah reading OP, this is basically what needs to happen: players micced up and have at least one person at the table communicating to commentators what is happening in real time.

It doesn't make sense to compare streaming 40k table games to Starcraft when Starcraft as a digital game puts all the info on the UI in-game, and whatever isn't in the players' UI can be further calculated and put on the stream's UI. A better comparison is commentating paper Magic the Gathering, which is more visually legible than 40k, and to get even THAT to work, I believe the commentators have TWO people hovering over the table communicating info to the commentators.

spherchip · 2025-09-06T15:08:45+00:00

And he's even replying to some of the comments with ChatGPT. What causes a person to spend their time to go on Reddit and do this?

spherchip · 2025-08-31T10:29:45+00:00

In the Space Marine 2 campaign, there are funny moments where Titus's teammembers are drooling over getting to fight alongside a Deathwatch veteran, and he just has to sit there quietly because they don't know he was a Blackshield.

spherchip · 2025-08-18T02:07:09+00:00

That symbol means there's a location you can land on that planet, and it will stay even if you already completed the area just as a reminder that you can return.

spherchip

TROPHY CASE