Ok, so I haven’t been here in quite a while, but I got super psyched to try the ranged combat, it looks awesome
One thing that did strike me however is the embark screen. I get totally stuck there rolling and rerolling to get at least 2 hearthlings with good combat stats - ie 6 body and 6 spirit and I started to think about it, I felt kinda dumb just sitting at the embark screen rolling my dice and not even starting the game. How could this be improved?
First thought was, when rerolling maybe there could be a checkbox to keep a hearthling and reroll the rest. Could lead to abuse where you roll and roll to get all of them to 6, 6, 6 (the number of the beast?) anyway. What else could be done?
Maybe the hearthlings could improve their stats (with some limitations) such as, loads of manual labour will make a hearthling stronger, permanent increase in the body stat. Maybe the herbalist has that special tonic that increases your spirit. Other ways could be questing, tokens from combat and so on. And of course balance it out. Maybe a hearthling can only enhance x amounts of stats and/or up to a certain limit?
Sorry for the rant, hopefully someone reads it and agrees or have other ideas to flesh out and/or improve
While I feel your frustration about rolling on the starting screen, I try to set less strict guidelines for some of my hearthlings (5-6 body with 3-4 spirit for eventual soldier, a couple 6 minds for crafters, etc), and I find that helps keep it down under 20 rolls or so.
Also, a lot of the different professions, especially the newer ones, do come with those kinds of stat bonuses. It won’t change the base, out of six stats you see on the character screen, but page over to attributes on your knights or herbalists (even farmers) and you’ll see some stats in green, which are buffed. Usually this is through unique benefits from their class.
just popping in to say that, the way stats are distributed have changed in A16, so that 6/6/6 and 1/1/1 characters are impossible to get. i believe stats are limited to 12 points or some such thing, @yshan could probably tell you more.
Thanks for clarifying, I was noticing this. It also seems disproportionately harder to roll characters with high spirit, vs. Characters with high mind.
Cool, glad i’m not the only one who have noticed What do you guys think of the second point? Making stats upgradable as part of some kind of character progression system?
The problem with buffs from levelling is that those either just add to the base scores, which doesn’t help the problem of needing strong base scores, or they don’t, which is counterintuitive and leads to weird minmaxing.
At root rolling scores is part of the roguelike / dwarf Fortress roots of this game but because you get fewer hearthlings there is an incentive to reroll until you get perfect dudes.
The best option is probably a points-allocation system (x points among y hearthlings) but that will need to wait on a starting ui redesign.
Has to be thirteen at least – I’ve seen plenty of 6/6/1. I’m not sure the algorithm is balanced though ; 6/6/1 characters seem a lot more common than 1/6/6 characters.
