Messages

61

General / I've had enough of the Deep Caverns (spoilery help-request)

« on: December 25, 2015, 10:23:32 pm »

Alright, so this is just getting frustrating. I have a crossbow-wielding character who is performing very poorly against the Tchortlings. I'm wandering around in the Deep Caverns, with no idea what to do, not finding anything that I think I need and getting lost in tunnel mazes with worm creatures I cannot damage, nor escape if they happen to spot me. I'm not sure if crossbow characters are just particularly weak at this stage or every character has this much trouble, but I'm having a hell of a time trying to make any progress, mostly because enemies just take so long to kill, and the only way I can kill some of the stronger Tchortling creatures is by zipping in and out of zones every two turns and healing up.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask a few questions. Please don't spoil anything more than what is absolutely necessary to answer.

• What do I need to do? What is the absolute shortest series of tasks I need to accomplish to get out of this place? Do I need to do any of that stuff the Tchortist boss guy is telling me to do?
• Is there any way the Faceless will ever let me into their areas, or will I have to keep sneaking by? (If it's the latter, I'll stop reloading every time I bump into a Faceless Gaunt, which I've been doing so far just to be careful.)
• Does the game end at whatever is the conclusion of this Deep Caverns questline (which, I guess, might be killing Tchort, or making sweet love to it, or any other kind of interaction with it - please don't spoil it) or will there be more? 'Cause there are questlines in the Underrail proper that I know to exist but which I haven't done anything with. (I'm just asking because if this is the last section, I'm thinking about starting a new, more powerful character. You have no idea how frustrating it is to plink away at stuff with a crossbow for real-life hours. Or maybe you do, if you've tried a build similar to mine.)

62

Suggestions / Thick Skull seems a bit dubious

« on: December 25, 2015, 10:22:36 am »

Thick Skull seems like a nice little feat and I took it for my character, but I quickly found that it sometimes works in a very dubious fashion. It is all well and good that it leaves me only Dazed when I'd be otherwise stunned (which is useful, for example, against crossbow enemies using a few Shock Bolts or psions using a few electric attacks at the start of the battle), but the problem is, there is no "Second Wind" anymore. This, in turn, means that enemies that can stun me every turn with their attacks (Coil Spiders! As well as anyone else using strong electric attacks on a regular basis) can also daze me every turn. This actually seems to be a bit of a downgrade in a way - without Thick Skull, I was immune to stunning effects for the two turns of Second Wind and didn't get dazed either, while now I get -15 AP every turn. We could also look at it this way: stunning removes 50 AP (if you have not boosted your APs) and the ability to dodge and act, but then you are immune for two turns. Now, over the course of three turns, getting constantly Dazed means that I lose 3*15=45 AP. More specifically, using a crossbow with an AP cost of 21, and assuming no AP boosts, I lose two normal attacks when I get stunned, but I lose one normal attack each turn with the "constantly dazed" option, which actually leads to repeated "Dazed" arguably being worse than being Stunned and no Thick Skull in certain situations, at least for my character.

My suggestion is simple: have a "Second Wind"-type of effect apply to "Dazed" as well, for characters with Thick Skull. (I.e. you are immune to being Dazed as well for two turns.) That'd make the feat a clearly superior option in all cases to fighting without it and make the feat more useful in general.

63

Suggestions / A suggestion to make entrances more visible

« on: December 25, 2015, 10:08:44 am »

Some entrances really are very hard to see. Case in point:



It is not obvious at all that there are stairs leading up just behind my character. I actually wasn't sure how to get up for a long while because I thought that dark grey thing there was just a wall, not stairs. The other side of this area has a small blue patch so it's more visible there, but I was mostly looking at this part at first.



Again, it's hard to see that there is a transition area here - you can only realize this if you happen to mouse over by accident. It makes things more confusing that often, ostensibly open areas like these are actually just dead ends.

Now, I think that there should be a way to make entrances more obviously visible so you can see where you can enter or leave an area. I think that pressing Tab could fulfill this function too. There are two solutions I can think of: either name every single transition area or (the more elegant solution in my opinion) just have the red and blue colored squares that indicate the exits go to the top when you press Tab, displaying over everything else (perhaps in a translucent manner so it's not too ugly).

64

General / Re: What the point of Diassemble as a feat ?

« on: December 24, 2015, 12:29:13 pm »

I don't think it's useless - I got it myself and have found some use for it:

• You can get components with it which you can't find in a shop (e.g. for me, it was the Pneumatic Reloader for my current crossbow that I got this way), plus reuse them when your old weapon becomes obsolete
• If you find a good weapon (again, like a crossbow in my case) with the wrong secondary components on it, you can disassemble it and put the proper components on it, at the cost of a little quality drop

[li]I'm not sure about this, but theoretically, if the skill requirement drops along with the quality, you could use Disassemble to lower the skill requirement of an item to a level you can craft it at if it's currently too high. I'll have to check out if this really is the case.
[/li][/list]

It certainly is a good feat in theory and has some good uses in practice, although you can probably live without it in most cases.

65

Suggestions / More verbal warnings

« on: December 23, 2015, 04:56:42 pm »

Sometimes, I feel like NPCs should give you more warnings about accessing certain areas. There are two examples I can think of. In the United Stations embassy in the Junkyard, there is a Protectorate Soldier standing right inside, warning you to unequip your weapons when you enter. Now, I don't remember if he forces a dialog with you the first time you enter (if he doesn't, he definitely should), but I think a single warning each time you enter the area with a weapon wouldn't be a bad idea. (The warning should only trigger while you are in that entrance area, of course.)

Another, more severe example (in terms of annoyance, since you probably won't lose much progress if you have autosaves on) is the Foundry prison. Once you enter the room south of the northern corridor, the guards and everyone attack you, even though none of the two guards nor anyone else (not even common sense) gives any indication that the area is off-limits. (In fact, for all I know, maybe I'm just supposed to unequip my weapons there like in the embassy, but I get no indication either way.)

66

Bugs / Two combat bugs which may or may not be related + Last Stand

« on: December 23, 2015, 04:51:01 pm »

I've had a bug first happen to me while fighting the Black Crawlers. One of the enemies ran out of ammo but seemed to be trying to reload, unsuccessfully, getting the warning message "Out of Ammo!" about 8 times before giving up and passing his turn, doing nothing else of use. I presume that there is some timeout mechanic for enemy turns, or else he'd probably have tried to reload his pistol forever.

I also got a bug in the Ironhead base - here is a save to test it out. Basically, attack Balor and observe as he does nothing - nothing at all during the entire battle, allowing one to kill him with ease. I suspect that he may be having the same problem as that Black Crawler, trying to do an action he cannot and eventually giving up. My suspicion is that the action is 'switching on his energy shield', perhaps, as Balor's AI worked just fine before I breached his shield. Thus I think that these two may be instances of the same bug.

Finally, an unrelated issue: the description of Last Stand states that you get two turns of full health. This is a little misleading IMO, since you only get one effective turn out of it: after you activate Last Stand, you get one turn where the enemies are trying to hit you at full health. After your next turn (i.e. at the start of the enemies' next turn) your health goes to 1, meaning that if there are still enemies around, they're going to kill you if they hit even just once, and you don't really get a second turn. I'm not sure if this is an issue with how the skill works or the description, but one of them should be modified.

67

Bugs / Re: Text errors in Persuasion option in Junkyard

« on: December 21, 2015, 02:35:08 pm »

Is it really a bug that there are two "five" options? Perhaps it's just that you are supposed to guess which excuse Vince will believe.

68

General / Re: Selling things

« on: December 20, 2015, 08:15:19 pm »

The value of an item might be 40, but that does not mean you will get 40 of any given currency. South Gate Station Credits are worth 10, so you will get 4 SGS credits for an object that is worth 40 with no haggling and all that. Of course, it works both ways. Later, you will have other currencies which have a different relation to the item's "objective value".

To get money - I'm kinda new so I probably don't have all the best advice either, but just going around and exploring lets you find some good stuff, and other than that, you can probably make some nice money early on by crafting rathound leather into leather armor (needs Tailoring).

69

Discussions / Re: How did you find out about this game?

« on: December 17, 2015, 04:01:38 pm »

It was part of a GamersGate bundle along with other games I was more interested in, possibly years ago, though the bundle itself was very cheap and thus the alpha version of Underrail was almost free for me. And get this, I was just looking for games in my gaming libraries to play today (!) when I stumbled upon Underrail and realized that it's about to come out tomorrow! And more than that, reading about it revealed that it does look kind of awesome. So, I'm very intrigued now and glad I noticed it "gathering dust".