Kenshi - A Sandbox RPG

I grabbed this off of Steam a few months ago. A lot of weird little bugs in the game right now but the developer has been pushing out fixes and updates at a decent rate and he brought on an extra guy last month. It's been either a lot of micromanagement or just flat out exploiting so far to win fights early on until your guys get good enough to hold their own but it seems like a good enough premise to where I'm interested to see where he starts taking this. I had a few false starts with the solo starter players so ended up going with the one who got a whole party of characters to begin with. Two generic guys, one warrior and three laborers. Ended up just starting my own town on a trade path between one of the outposts and a major town. Within the first week of in-game time you are going to get completely trounced by bandits so it's a good idea to be close to a good base of NPC guards where you can kite the bandits off to get killed when the fight turns bad (and it definitely will turn bad for a good chunk of time until you level up). A lot of things weren't in-game yet when I last played a month ago but I think that walls are now in and maybe ranged weapons. Fun game so far but a really steep learning curve.

**edit** the damage system has been the best part of the game so far. My blacksmith had just learned how to make steel blunt weapons and my soldiers basically just break people's arms in the first two swings of combat now. The bandits end up just stumbling around with two broken arms until the soldiers randomly decide to just bludgeon them to death.

started this up today due to the complete deluge of shite being released lately. A lot of good progress since I last played. The guy included music which is some ambient countryish/post-rock/asian sounding stuff (a little like Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack if it were played by Godspeed You Black Emperor). Your towns can actually be trading posts now and my shop and bar are functional now (it appears that I had built enough in the earlier versions that my town is now a marker on the map as well). He included walls so you can actually build defenses to help ward off bandits and you can craft armor. The production lines seem to have gotten beefed up a little too and there are a bunch of recipes that I don't think that I had before. Still an interesting concept.

How similar is this to mount and blade?

Started it up, ran around for 15m before finding any bandits which promptly whipped my ass. Is there anything to the combat besides clicking the guy and watching your dude swing the sword?

that's pretty much it and your guys even suck at that in the beginning. Starting off you really need to exploit a bit to get on your feet. Find some bandits and kite them back to a large town, wait for the town guards to kill them and then grab their stuff and sell it or upgrade your own gear. The early game in this verges on being impossibly difficult if you don't get lucky and don't make the npc guards do the heavy lifting for a while. Once you get some money you can pick up a few more guys and have one act as a healer then you can begin to hold your own in fights.

I moved to a different city and there was a ton more action going on and the game was more enjoyable. I played all yesterday and now I have a squad rolling 20 deep cruising around. We can take small packs of samurai and paladins but incur heavy damage from it.

What's the best way to get good gear? As in better than what I'm looting off of enemies.

If it's to build a city and start crafting I have one engineer and three medics and about 60k cats so I think I'm ready. Where should I build a city and what do I have to do to not screw it up?

If there's a place I can go to buy non-shitty gear that's fine too.

Oh and duppin how can you say this game is not like mount and blade? It's the same except it has city building and crafting where M&B has lords and horses.

One minor difference that is pretty cool between this and M&B is that there's no separation between the world and the combat maps. This means that instead of looking at an 800x800 pixel square of your units visible range for fools to smash you're constantly panning around and scanning the horizon of an ingame world. It's very easy to miss high-value targets on the horizon so it adds a layer of depth to what I consider one of the worst parts of M&B: searching for enemies.

Still I think searching for enemies will get pretty monotonous. If the city building, defending and attacking doesn't flow well I doubt I'll play this very long. I don't know why but the holy paladin faction was aggressive toward me from the start(maybe cause I have the holy sword character?) so my overall goal is to eliminate them.

Tuco_sl said:

I moved to a different city and there was a ton more action going on and the game was more enjoyable. I played all yesterday and now I have a squad rolling 20 deep cruising around. We can take small packs of samurai and paladins but incur heavy damage from it.

What's the best way to get good gear? As in better than what I'm looting off of enemies.

If it's to build a city and start crafting I have one engineer and three medics and about 60k cats so I think I'm ready. Where should I build a city and what do I have to do to not screw it up?

If there's a place I can go to buy non-shitty gear that's fine too.

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To get better stuff than you could get off of corpses from a larger battle involving tougher guys than standard bandits you are going to have to craft so you're next step is going to definitely be building a city. The best places to build are in between cities and outposts. I built mine in the far south which ended up being good as a starter town since I only run into small groups of bandits but I am very far away from the larger factions and their fights so I'm stuck completely relying on my blacksmith to get good gear.

I'm pretty sure that you can just start building whatever is available from the start and you won't have to worry about screwing up your city. Your initial small houses can be gutted and filled with storage units once you research into the larger houses. There used to be a bug where the generators wouldn't start producing power until you saved and restarted but that might have been cleared up. Almost everything other than research tables gets to have the same building upgrade to the next level so I guess be careful with placement of your initial material crafting buildings. I would say have enough space available to build some of the very large buildings (like the actual outpost buildings, you'll eventually be able to build almost everything that you see int he large cities). I crammed my city into a mountain pass for security but am now very restricted with what else can fit close to my production buildings. I had to start building my outpost IV about 200 yards away from my city which lead to bandits trying to pick off my builders.

It ends up being a bit like EVE once you've established a city, it's a lot of waiting around for brief periods of action if you keep close your city but now that walls are in you can safely leave your laborers and engineers in town and head out with most of your warriors and have enough time to head back if someone decides to throw a large attack at your home base.

Just buy the game bros, these games need our support, it's only ~$15 and the game doesn't really work with only a couple people. I think this game works best with 10ish people in your squad, though I have the max of 20 because powergamer.

So I spent all of yesterday running to each city I was non-kos to for the fragment axe blueprints and couldn't find it, and no where on the internet does it specify where all the patterns were. I have the holy sword start which turns out is a terrible first character choice because it makes you kos to the best cities (the holy bro cities) which happen to have the fragment axe blueprints. So I took my fastest guy and ran around town with a hundred holy bros chasing him, sprinted to the front desk of the weapon store, smashed the glass counter, grabbed the blueprint (but gave them the 10k or whatever cats) and ran out with it. The value of the fragment axe, apparently, is that it trains strength for your dudes and also hits every enemy around the guy swinging it.

I've also got quite a village set up now. My biggest regret is that I didn't get a dude on a research bench somewhere in an NPC city asap while my guys were off training / getting money. Researching the top end gear takes a long time and I have a fully functional production line for weapons/armor while my research isn't even halfway done yet. I think if my goal for a city was to make money starting the research with the city would make sense since you can probably make good money with just wheat farm + silo + oven. But if you want the best items it takes weeks to research to it and only a few days to build up a city.

Now that I have a full set of some midtier fragment axes I think I'm going to let my researcher do his thing (I might have to buy him a store in a city so he doesn't get attacked) and have everyone else wander around smashing fools. There's a mod:Lo-Fi Games View topic - Larger Group Combatthat is supposed to increase the mob density of roaming mobs. This would cause the samurai and paladin groups to probably be too tough for me atm but I might try it anyway.