Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Caliane

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is loot semi-randomized at all?

just started my Barony, and one of the vendors is selling a +1 towershield with +3reflex saves, and 10 fire dr. Tower shield spec might be weak.. but when you got specialized items like that, saying "fireball the shit out of me, with no friendly fire", I mean...

my party spec is ending up a bit mismatched. Went transmut support wizard. enlarge, haste, bears str, etc.. But im realizing now, I also, cut out all the melee. Linzi is ranged bard, I dropped harram the melee cleric for cloth boy. octavia is arcane trickster. all these casters are not benefiting from haste. A.I. on Ocativa always defaults to acid splash...

Also went with outflank, and even gave Val a Keen kukri, for 15-20 threat range... but, again, moved the party away from melee. oops.. Should have probably made Linzi a melee bard.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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is loot semi-randomized at all?

just started my Barony, and one of the vendors is selling a +1 towershield with +3reflex saves, and 10 fire dr. Tower shield spec might be weak.. but when you got specialized items like that, saying "fireball the shit out of me, with no friendly fire", I mean...

my party spec is ending up a bit mismatched. Went transmut support wizard. enlarge, haste, bears str, etc.. But im realizing now, I also, cut out all the melee. Linzi is ranged bard, I dropped harram the melee cleric for cloth boy. octavia is arcane trickster. all these casters are not benefiting from haste. A.I. on Ocativa always defaults to acid splash...

Also went with outflank, and even gave Val a Keen kukri, for 15-20 threat range... but, again, moved the party away from melee. oops.. Should have probably made Linzi a melee bard.

Yes. Octavia's annoying shit with acid splash can't be removed. So you have to manually manage her shit. I had Linzi as a Thundercaller bard which is very strong. My melee were Val, Amiri (respecced Invulnerable Rager), Nok Nok and myself sometimes. Tristan/Linzi took up the rear.
 

slippery

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I'm pretty sure I always had Octavia attacking with a bow. Something like right click off Acid Splash then right click the bow attack option
 

Caliane

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Yes. Octavia's annoying shit with acid splash can't be removed. So you have to manually manage her shit. I had Linzi as a Thundercaller bard which is very strong. My melee were Val, Amiri (respecced Invulnerable Rager), Nok Nok and myself sometimes. Tristan/Linzi took up the rear.
yeah, I decided not to force respec em via mods. so, lindzi is staying a generic bard.

I think I can set Octavia to autocast ray of frost, which then can be weapon spec'd ray. in "most" cases the touch AC I think should mean ray of frost will outperform an xbow. Again, except in the case of haste, and the like in play.. I'll have to look to see if the A.I. will stick with the xbow when haste is cast. It could be also the touch AC is what is making the A.I. default to acid splash. and its smart enough to check touch vs ranged AC. same with weapon spec, maybe she'll default to ray spells naturally, with it speced...
 

Void

Experiencer
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I was on vacation the past week and played this most of that time, so I've learned a lot that I didn't know before.

First, to make someone like Octavia just shoot her bow, right click on the "Charge" button. She obviously can't charge with a bow, so she shoots it, instead of defaulting to motherfucking acid splash. No, that's not intuitive, I had to google it and someone else discovered it. You can do the same thing with other problematic characters that you want to just sit there and shoot.

Also, somehow I lost my chance at Jubilost as a character. I got the trigger that everyone talks about (horse and cart in the river) and he wasn't there, and he never showed up afterwards either. Not that big of a loss because I had no plans to use him, but I'm certain there is a quest or two I won't get now.

For the longest time I stuck with Octavia and Linzi because I liked their characters and they were "useful" in their own way. Buffs, etc. And I just felt like they belonged on the team. The rest of my team is me (Spawn Slayer with 2h reach weapon/dreadful carnage/cornugan smash/all that shit), Valerie as 2h shield fighter, Tristian, and the hotty kineticist. Eventually though, I realized I was lacking something. My medium armor slayer was essentially the second tank, so if battles lasted too long I got wrecked. And while Linzi's buffs helped and Octavia's bow/spells were nice, it just wasn't working. So I swapped those two for Nok-Nok and Ekun. So I got 2 tanks better than me (the wolf from Ekun and Nok-Nok with his amazeballs dex), and two MASSIVE dps upgrades. Holy fucking shit, stuff just sometimes sorta explodes when those two get a couple good rolls. My character is pretty good dps with cleave and all that, but just fucking wow. And with those 2 kukris you get that are pretty much tailor-made for Nok-Nok with keen (expanded crit range), he crits all the fucking time.

Anyway, I miss all the buffs and shit, but most fights it doesn't matter now. I'm level 11, so still have a lot of the game to go, maybe I'll have to change it up again. Speaking of, I hate tasks where I have to put someone I never use in for that quest (looking at Harrim and Regongar mainly).
 

Kriptini

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Yeah the way flanking works in this game makes Rogues pretty OP. Nok Nok's Will save is utter trash though so try to find a way to bump it up or else you're going to have a real bad time in the late game.
 

Argarth

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Just wanted to add some extra findings after playing some more with the performance fix that Gestahl Gestahl provided earlier in the thread.

Seems that wasn't the end of the story. Even though game performance went up considerably, and the stutter/hitching went way down, it still wasn't perfect. After bashing my head against the wall some more looking for that "buttery smooth at all times" experience, I remembered back to release of Ryzen 1 and how a limited number of games were performing better with multi-threading (SMT) turned off.

Since my last post, I've tried a few other Core Affinity combinations, even locking the game to 8 discrete threads on unique cores, but no luck, none as good as 4C/8T. Couldn't see how the game would perform better with even fewer threads, since the output.log file TELLS you that the game is creating 8 worker threads... Well, blindsided by that one!

So, set the game to just use the first 4 cores with a single thread each, and fuck me, the performance has jumped up even further again, and the hitching has completely gone!!

On a side note VRR only works for my setup (2700X/1080Ti) in Full Screen Exclusive mode, but now at least it's finally working properly, so very happy camper.

Not sure if all this is a peculiarity of the Unity Engine, the way Owlcat coded the game, my setup, or a combination. Would be interesting to see what others make of it.
 
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slippery

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Just wanted to add some extra findings after playing some more with the performance fix that Gestahl Gestahl provided earlier in the thread.

Seems that wasn't the end of the story. Even though game performance went up considerably, and the stutter/hitching went way down, it still wasn't perfect. After bashing my head against the wall some more looking for that "buttery smooth at all times" experience, I remembered back to release of Ryzen 1 and how a limited number of games were performing better with multi-threading (SMT) turned off.

Since my last post, I've tried a few other Core Affinity combinations, even locking the game to 8 discrete threads on unique cores, but no luck, none as good as 4C/8T. Couldn't see how the game would perform better with even fewer threads, since the output.log file TELLS you that the game is creating 8 worker threads... Well, blindsided by that one!

So, set the game to just use the first 4 cores with a single thread each, and fuck me, the performance has jumped up even further again, and the hitching has completely gone!!

On a side note VRR only works for my setup (2700X/1080Ti) in Full Screen Exclusive mode, but now at least it's finally working properly, so very happy camper.

Not sure if all this is a peculiarity of the Unity Engine, the way Owlcat coded the game, my setup, or a combination. Would be interesting to see what others make of it.
I would search for unity stuff, that's likely the problem, and you'll likely find a solution easier that way
 

Argarth

On the verandah
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I would search for unity stuff, that's likely the problem, and you'll likely find a solution easier that way

Yeah, I've been reading a ton of stuff about Unity and other games using the engine, and nothing really conclusive. Command line switches and other stuff, but there's only so much the end user can do of course. The solution above works for me (and others, but not all, depending on which board you're on) and I can enjoy playing the game fully now, so that's the main thing. =)

Just for the hell of it I ran some numbers - Fresh saved character standing in the Banquet Hall, VSYNC off, VRR off, no frame limiter etc. Graphics settings on HIGH, FS Exclusive.
Interesting just how much the FPS changes doing nothing but changing the Core affinity, and tabbing back into the game:
8 core / 16 thread = 142 FPS
4 core / 8 thread = 163 FPS
4 core / 4 thread = 179 FPS
Truly an Upside-Down Bizarro World game this one. o_O
 

Caliane

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Chugging along.
The "which quests are timed, and which are not" mechanics are still pretty unfun. I get the idea conceptually. Like a DM, gives you quests, and things progress accordingly. But it just never works right in a Virtual DM, cause it can't adapt. The either/or mechanic of the very first quests works decently. going to one, progresses the alternative.

But like "troll trouble", go to the narlmarches cuase of trolls. Also, heres 100 other things to do, including a lost child. we aren't going to be clear the trolls should be #1 priority. Also, we aren't going to specify north, south, or Dire narl.
Also, heres some Barony things that lock your character into upgrades for 14 days for some reason, and will totally make you fail a shitload of things, if you make the mistake of doing these are the wrong time. Why didn't you know upgrading your military has no effect on killing trolls rampaging your lands? you have to go deal with it personally.

That 14 day lock out in generally is really bad design.
And this is EE. I can't imagine what this was like at launch.
 

Kriptini

Vyemm Raider
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Yeah it sucks. As a rule of thumb, always handle the big chapter quest first before doing any kingdom upgrading. Sidequests you can do along the way as most of them won't take more than a day or two to complete and they'll grant you EXP - really the only thing you shouldn't be doing is kingdom upgrading, and the upgrades that lock you into 14 days of waiting will say so on them as well as displaying your character's picture on the event card.

There are only two times (that I can remember) where it wasn't entirely obvious where to go - the beginning of Toll Trouble and the end of Season of Bloom. For the beginning of Troll Trouble, you're going to want to go west of your capital to the Skunk River Ford - the encounter there should give you enough clues on what to look for next. The monster den you're looking for at the end of Season of Bloom sounds like it should be easy to find, but gave me a lot of difficulty, and the timer for that is pretty tight. Spoiler for location:

Southeast of Lake Silverstep Village, on the peninsula-looking thing.
 

Harshaw

Throbbing Member
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Chugging along.
The "which quests are timed, and which are not" mechanics are still pretty unfun. I get the idea conceptually. Like a DM, gives you quests, and things progress accordingly. But it just never works right in a Virtual DM, cause it can't adapt. The either/or mechanic of the very first quests works decently. going to one, progresses the alternative.

But like "troll trouble", go to the narlmarches cuase of trolls. Also, heres 100 other things to do, including a lost child. we aren't going to be clear the trolls should be #1 priority. Also, we aren't going to specify north, south, or Dire narl.
Also, heres some Barony things that lock your character into upgrades for 14 days for some reason, and will totally make you fail a shitload of things, if you make the mistake of doing these are the wrong time. Why didn't you know upgrading your military has no effect on killing trolls rampaging your lands? you have to go deal with it personally.

That 14 day lock out in generally is really bad design.
And this is EE. I can't imagine what this was like at launch.


After my initial play through I said fuck it and got the Kingdom resolution mod. You can cut that 2 week shit down to a day.
 

Kirun

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I've had this in my backlog for a while. Considering buying some of the DLC as well. Any that are "must haves" and any that I should avoid? Or is all of it pretty solid?
 

j00t

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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it's all pretty solid for what it is. nothing that you absolutely NEED, but it is nice that the dlc's intregrate themselves into the regular game pretty seamlessly
 

slippery

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The last one is probably the best DLC for the infinite dungeon. They are relatively worth it, but not necessary by any means. You won't really be missing anything without them
 

Caliane

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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The Teifling DLC from what I understand adds Aviarys to the kingdom management building list, at a certain relations tier. these add a pretty useful mechanic allowing kingdom management in unclaimed territories, neighboring claimed ones.
 

Kirun

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Reading the DLC list, it sounds like I should start the game playing Varnhold's Lot, and then import those achievements to the main story?

Also, on the "endless dungeon" DLC, is it literally just a rogue-like to see how far you can go with your main character/newly created characters? If that's the case, I'll probably skip this one if it has no real story/lore implications.
 

j00t

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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there's some story specific to the infinite dungeon, and possibly to the world at large? the infinite dungeon is VERY similar to a 1st edition style game, where you just go dungeon delving for loot. personally i like it because the rate at which you level up is MUCH quicker, so you can get a good feel for a character build without having to play 10 hours and then decide you don't like it